by Pari Noskin Taichert

More than a quarter century ago, I met a plump, henna-haired woman named Elen who’d been born in Bethlehem. We commuted from Ann Arbor to the International Institute of Detroit. The hour-long trips in each direction provided a bit of micro-detente as we discussed Israeli-Palestinian relations, the similarities and differences between Judaism and Islam.

When she was fourteen, Elen married a man more than thirty years her senior. At that time, she neither read nor wrote. Her mission in life was to serve her husband, have babies and take care of them, cook and clean. When her family immigrated to the U.S., she was still illiterate.

But American culture seeped into her bones. Elen decided that someday she wanted to work outside the home, to bring money in, and to help provide for her sons’ education. Though she only broached the subject once or twice with her husband, his response was extreme and negative.

Elen didn’t give up.

Quietly, in her twenties, Elen taught herself to read and write. In her early thirties, she passed her GED. She started taking college courses. At all times, Elen did everything her family expected her to do, putting her husband’s and sons’ needs before her own. Still, little by little, step by step, she earned her BA.

When we first met, Elen was in her forties and working toward an MSW. Her speciality involved helping the Chaldean population in Detroit. Somehow, after more than thirty years, she’d worn down her husband enough to openly pursue her career.

When she first told me her story, I was appalled and demanded, "How could you stand it?"

"Pari, I’m like a river," she said without a hint of regret or anger. "My husband is a rock blocking my path. With time, I carve away all his objections and flow freely."

Though she never thought of herself as exceptional, I believe Elen’s story is a shining example of perseverance and practicality set against daunting odds. It demonstrates an astounding ability to keep goals in mind no matter what pitfalls or discouragements may try to undermine individual resolve.

All of us — writers, businesspeople, artists, parents — can learn from her story.

So, the next time whining, or self-pity, knocks at your consciousness, I’d ask you to remember Elen. Her path wasn’t just about a career. She had to change a man whose entire life and culture rejected what she wanted.

Elen succeeded.

So can we all

Jeffrey Cohen

I have a character who’s not behaving.

In the midst of the second book in a series that hasn’t started yet (if you can follow that), I have a character I can’t quite get a handle on. I thought I understood this guy perfectly before I began writing; in fact, I’d modeled him specifically on someone whose personality I understand very well. But he’s refusing to be that guy, and while he’s not exactly doing things I didn’t have planned, I’m finding it more difficult than I expected to get him across the way I wanted.

This is a new problem for me; usually, characters are my least troubling aspect of writing. I love the little goofballs, from the least prominent in the story to the ones who dominate the book. I write them spontaneously, for the most part, and I’m used to them generally behaving themselves as they go, even if they do something a little unexpected every once in a while just for variety.

The current situation presents a new challenge, which is something writers both crave and dread. Writing the damn books is hard enough without being able to fall on old tricks, but on the other hand, having a different set of puzzles to solve keeps the process fresh in the writer’s head, while making the writing more interesting (in theory) because you’re not, um, falling back on old tricks.

Still, did this guy have to start being a pain in Chapter Three? He couldn’t have come on for a brief appearance late in the book, when I’m confident in the work? I’m going to be stuck with this character for another 200 pages or so, and so far, I’m not in the groove with him. It’s frustrating.

But that’s not what I wanted to write about.

I read a few weeks ago that some Great Big Author (I forget which one, but you’d recognize the name) was absolutely aghast at the idea that characters ever do things the author didn’t expect. After all, a character comes from your own mind, not from an external source. They can’t do things you don’t ask them to do; it’s psychologically impossible, unless you have a considerably more serious problem than Writer’s Block (another affliction in which I don’t believe). So it makes perfect sense that the Great Big Author would mock the idea that characters have free will. It is, after all, just a silly idea.

Except that it has happened to me.

My process is not what you’d call extremely well organized. I don’t outline; I don’t take notes. Once the story is sufficiently developed in my head (sometimes after years of cooking), I sit down and start writing. I usually have a good notion of where the major sequences–for mystery, that would include the murder and the discovery of important clues, as well as the solution–are going to fall, and how they’ll be presented. But that’s about it. I put the characters into situations, and then let them work on how to deal with them, based on their personalities. I never operate under the delusion that the work isn’t coming from my own head, but I certainly don’t systematize it ahead of time. Stuff happens when it happens.

In my second novel, A FAREWELL TO LEGS, Aaron Tucker, the freelance reporter and reluctant sleuth, is in Washington, DC to investigate a crime. He meets with a local PD detective with whom he has a bantering relationship–Aaron has a bantering relationship with just about everybody–and they discuss the crime. Aaron teases the cop on the lack of clues being discovered, as the victim in this case was a prominent politician and the investigation is a high priority. Aaron puts forth the statement that the DC police haven’t even found any DNA at the crime scene, and you’d think they’d be able to come up with something that would point them in a direction.

Now, when writing a chapter, I’m usually looking for the ending first. If I know where I’m going to end up, which piece of information–usually meant to get the reader to keep going to the next chapter–will be revealed, then I can write the scene. It’s a screenwriting trick, and I use it to keep my momentum going. In this case, Aaron’s teasing was going to lead to the statement by the policeman that some DNA, from a suspect’s hair, was discovered. But I couldn’t decide how to make it dramatic and not reveal the suspect’s name (I had no idea whose hair it was yet) at the same time.

I kept writing dialogue, as that’s my favorite part of the process, and the detective did indeed tell Aaron that DNA from a hair was discovered at the scene. Aaron, as seems natural, asked him why the cops didn’t just go and arrest the person whose hair had been found.

And the cop said, “He’s dead. (The character) was executed seven years ago.”

I remember typing that, reading it over, and saying out loud, “WHAT?”

It sounded awfully cool, though, and since this was a point in the book where Aaron should be running into more questions, rather than solutions, I left it in. But then, I had to figure out how that could be true.

I’m not going to tell you how I resolved the situation (my publisher still has plenty of books in his basement, and a guy’s got to make a living), but the point is that I didn’t know the character was going to say that before I wrote it. I hadn’t planned it, obviously, and I didn’t have an explanation at hand when the scene was finished. But because it seemed like the right thing, I kept the statement, and tried to work on a plausible solution for that mystery, which in my not-so-humble opinion, I think I managed.

So don’t tell me that characters don’t have a certain life of their own. Because if they don’t, and that incident is still true–and it is–then I’m hearing voices, and I’d prefer not to take that public just yet.

Meanwhile, Tuesday is Election Day. Get off your butt and vote.

Great fiction can teach a writer a lot about their craft, but so can bad fiction.  I don’t go out of my way to find crappy stories, but if I come across one, I won’t trash it, I’ll examine it. 

Last year, I attended the Alameda International Film Festival on Halloween night because the organizers were showcasing a number of short horror features.  It was held at a great little community movie theatre located on a quite neighborhood street.  In a previous life, the theatre had been a church.  Now the pulpit served as the projector room.  The pews had been replaced, but instead of theatre seating, it was all threadbare sofas and la-z-boys.  Neat!

That was the good side of the evening.  Sadly, only a couple of films were entertaining.  Most were lacking and a couple were damn right awful.  I didn’t go in with high hopes, but I was hoping for something to stand out.  However, the night wasn’t a washout.  Each of the films taught me something about my writing.  Several of the stories lacked subtext, and were nothing more than a series of events daisychained together.  Others blew my suspension of disbelief because they lacked credibility and/or suffered logic problems.  A couple had complex stories that were unsuccessfully told.  A couple of stories had conclusions come out of nowhere, while others were so obvious that I knew what to expect moments after the opening credits.  One was technically perfect from a story standpoint, but suffered from awful dialog. 

I walked away from the night with a head full of pointers.  The movies made me conscious of my own work.  Had I committed any of these cardinal sins in my current batch of works and in my past stories?  Because of what I’d seen, I gave a couple of my "finished" short stories another going over just to make sure I hadn’t commited the same literary sins. 

The problem is that after a while, it’s easy to get complacent.  I’ve gotten comfortable with my writing voice and if I don’t pay attention, my writing will get worse and not better.  Seeing someone else’s mistakes makes me think about my own potential clangers sticking out from my manuscripts.

A truly great story can inspire and educate, but it can’t demonstrate the mistakes.  For that, you have to look at the imperfect.

Simon Wood

PS:  Apologies for the brevity of this week’s entry, but our house was vandalized (nothing too heavy) and things still need taking care of.

Deni Dietz‘s QUIBBLES & BITS

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

What, you thought I wasn’t going to write about Halloween?

BORN ON HALLOWEEN:
*Dale Evans
*Dick Francis [jockey/mystery author]
*Dan Rather
*Michael Landon
*Kinky Friedman [country rocker, humorist, mystery author and 2006 Texas
gubernatorial candidate]
*Supertramp’s Bob Selbenberg
*Jane Pauley
*Val Kilmer
*U2’s drummer Larry Mullen Jr.
*Vanilla Ice (Robert Van Winkle)

DIED ON HALLOWEEN:
*Harry Houdini
*Indira Ghandi
*Federico Fellini
*River Phoenix

HALLOWEEN BITS:

My father, who lived on a farm in West Virginia, liked to reminisce about Halloween – about how he and his friends would topple outhouses.

Nowadays, kids decorate trees with toilet paper.

We’ve come a long way, baby.

When I was a child, Moms who sewed would make elaborate costumes: fairy tale characters, ghosts, goblins and witches. Moms who couldn’t sew—like mine, for example—were more inventive. I often dressed in my father’s clothes, with a pillow taking up the slack. That probably had some influence on my writing from a man’s POV.

And since Halloween always seemed to hit around the time we took orders for Girl Scout Cookies, I’d knock on doors, accept my candy with a polite "thank you," and then sell the occupants boxes of GS cookies. Even then, I was into marketing and promotion.

During my first marriage, my ex and I attended a Halloween party. He wasn’t into costumes [probably one of the reasons I divorced him]. The people who threw the party instructed everyone to come dressed as an inanimate object. I wore black tights and a black leotard and black spiked heels (I hadn’t quite destroyed my feet yet). At my breasts and between my thighs I fastened fish hooks and colorful fishing lures, plus those nifty rubber spiders found on every drugstore counter.

I came dressed as Pandora’s Box.

I used that for CHAIN A LAMB CHOP TO THE BED. Lt. Peter Miller’s sister Beth attends a Halloween party as Pandora’s Box. There, she meets her husband Jonah, who is wearing briefs.

     Halfway through the party she discovered that he was a lawyer—briefs, ha-ha—and he wore underpants because he’d lost a bet and there was a prize for the best costume. Which, she assumed, he’d win. She had come as Pandora’s box, clothed in black tights and leotard, with fish hooks, rubber worms and colorful lures pinned to her breasts and crotch. She won first prize…and the lawyer.

One year while I was waiting tables, management decreed that costumes were compulsory. I donned black tights and a black leotard and…no, I didn’t come as Pandora’s Box. Instead, I safety-pinned printed pages from one of my manuscripts to the material; dozens of printed pages, all over my body, from head to toe. The idea was to come dressed as a book.

The night was cold, windy and rainy (later the rain would turn to sleet). My car broke down a mile and a half from the restaurant. I managed to park at the side of the road and began to walk. No one stopped to pick up a wet, black-clad person dressed as a book. Go figure. When I finally arrived for my shift, and people asked me what I was, I said, "I’m a book that’s been left out in the rain."

I haven’t used that experience (yet!) for a scene in one of my mysteries.

My first mystery – THROW DARTS AT A CHEESECAKE – climaxes with a Weight Winners Halloween party. The church room where the diet club members meet is decorated for the event and all the food is "legal." The perp attends in costume, and writing that was lots of fun. What costume, I wondered, should I dress my killer in?

So…what’s your favorite Halloween costume? One you wore as a kid or an adult. Come on, don’t be shy. It can’t possibly be worse than a book that’s been left out in the rain.

As you wish [and BOO],
Deni

by Pari Noskin Taichert

True confession time:
Twelve years ago when I began my first Sasha Solomon manuscript, I wasn’t a big mystery fan. Like many people who don’t know much about the genre, I had a pejorative, limited view of it. With a self-satisfied smirk, I called it, "bubble gum for the mind," and believed my own faulty rhetoric.

Still, common sense — and advice gleaned from writers’ groups and conferences — convinced me to try to get published in a definable genre rather than to go straight for mainstream fiction.

Oh, how I fought that advice.

I thought there was a formula, a magic one-two-three, that every mystery author stuck to. This repelled me; I despise being told what to do. The more rigid the structure, the more I want to blast it to smithereens.

So, my first two manuscripts were pieces of crappola. In them, I scoffed at all the conventions of the genre and ended up with about 800 unusable pages of cliches, lousy prose, and meandering plots.

Since CLOVIS’s publication, I’ve met many aspiring novelists. Our conversations often begin like this:

Pari:   Tell me about your book.
AN:     It’s not a typical mystery. It’s a thriller, mainstream novel with elements of literary fiction.

What intrigues me about this are two ideas. First, that there is a typical mystery. Frankly, the more I learn about the genre, the less I believe it’s true. And, second, the writer’s attempt to squiggle out of the genre. (I recognize the tell-tale signs . . . )

Before I started writing my mysteries, I didn’t know about the battles among our community’s subgenres. Hell, I didn’t know there were subgenres! I also didn’t know about the Otto Penzlers of the fiction world who actually derived pleasure from denigrating certain manifestations of crime fiction.

No, I fought the conventions of crime fiction simply because it was defined at all. I suffered from creative machismo. Somehow, I thought that to have a structure within which to work was admitting a lack of imagination or thought.

The truth is, I didn’t get published until I learned about the structure and general requirements of "traditional" mysteries. I now abide by many of those rules. Sasha Solomon, my protag, is an amateur sleuth. My books don’t have much graphic violence, sex, or profanity. They’re absolutely who-dunits.

I break rules, too. Sasha is a reluctant sleuth. She steps up because she has to, not because she’s particularly noble or curious at the moment — though she always grows in my books. Sasha also travels to many small towns — rather than staying in one charming or quaint little place — and all the towns have weird names. (This is a real marketing no-no. Oh, well. I have a weird name, too.).

What’s the lesson here?

Sometimes the fight is just plain stupid.

Now, when I read a review that says something like, "It transcends the genre," I think to myself, "That reviewer doesn’t know what he or she’s talking about."

At least in mysteries, the genre is a very flexible, very big, and tremendously satisfying canvas for both readers and writers.

Jeffrey Cohen

There’s something terribly wrong with me: my favorite horror movie is Young Frankenstein.

When you write mystery novels, people immediately assume you have an unusual taste for the macabre, an interest in death that transcends the usual “heaven, hell, purgatory or Cincinnati?” arguments and goes more to the Charles Addams area. They figure that because we have to concern ourselves with ways to off fictional people, we must really revel in the details, the very stuff of death, that we must seek out every possible avenue of information on murder.

They also think we must love horror movies. Our favorite books must be written by Stephen King. Our musical tastes? Black Sabbath, Slayer, Megadeth: what else? Our deities must be Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper and Betsy Palmer, who played a killer in the first Friday the 13th movie.

Well, I must clearly be a poor excuse for a mystery author, because I am not in the least attracted to the depiction of death, torture, dismemberment, mayhem or really deep paper cuts. I don’t even like roller coasters. I am a wimp of epic proportions.

It’s worth noting that Alfred Hitchcock once told an interviewer that he was “more scared than (the audience) of things in real life,” but I don’t care much for the fake stuff, either. I teach screenwriting at Drexel University, and one of my students this week mentioned Saw as a wonderful example of a fun experience. I would have been more vehement in my opposition to that statement, but I make it a policy not to yell at girls.

So when Halloween comes around, and suddenly every television network remembers that some people care for this stuff, we are rapidly bombarded with Freddy Kreuger, Michael Meyers (not the one from Wayne’s World), Leatherface, Jason and whatever other demons live in movies with Roman numerals in their titles.

We also get Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Wolf Man, and I love those guys. Here were some monsters you could sink your teeth into (or vice versa) without having to make sure you’d taken your seasickness medication first. They had personalities. They had flaws. They had angst (well, Dracula wasn’t really all that guilt-ridden; for that, you had to go to Barnabas Collins), regrets. They didn’t kill you for sport. And they didn’t kill you in the most grotesquely nauseating way possible just because they could.

Many of us spent a good deal of our childhoods watching horror movies on television, in showings that were aimed at children specifically. I somehow doubt Saw III , opening this week, would have passed muster with Zacherly or Captain Jack McCarthy.

So I’m a scaredy cat, but still, I have written novels in which people have been shot, knifed, shot (it’s convenient; what can I tell you?) and poisoned, and I’m writing another now in which a man will be… well, no. I haven’t entirely decided on that one yet, and besides, it’s two years away. You’ll forget. But my purpose is never to scare the reader; I’m more interested in the laugh. Does writing about violent acts when I abstain from watching them mean I’m a hypocrite?

I don’t think so: there’s a certain aspect of control freak in any author: sure, we read books, but we have to write some of our own because we want to decide what happens by ourselves. And in writing about things that frighten us, we get to conquer them, because we get to decide when and how they happen.

And to whom. It’s almost never to us.

So if you come by my house on Tuesday, we’ll be handing out what my children like to call “the good candy, which is anything that has chocolate in or on it. But if you’re wearing a really disturbing costume, or you look especially fierce or threatening, do me a favor and ring the bell twice. That’ll be our code.

I’ll make sure my son answers the door.

People see a hill and think, “What a lovely place to built a home.”  I see a hill and think, “What a great place to bury a body.”  People see a quiet stretch of shoreline and think, “What a great place for a romantic walk.”  I see a quiet stretch of shoreline and think, “What a great place to execute a snitch.”  That’s the problem I have with traveling these days.  I love visiting new places.  I want to see the world.  If I didn’t have an explorer’s heart, I never would have discovered my Julie in Costa Rica.  Now when I travel, I don’t see locations, I see crime scenes.

I’m always on the hunt for a great locale.  I say to friends, “You live in a great neighborhood.  Where would the best place be to stash a body without anyone seeing me?”  My friends are cool with it.  They roll their eyes and entertain my fantasies.  I’ve stopped asking strangers these questions.  For some reason, it scares people.  Who knew?

I’m not a keen researcher as things go.  I like to lie in my stories, but I do like to go location hunting.  Accidents Waiting to Happen is set in Sacramento.  I’d only been there a couple of months when I got to writing it, so I needed some killing grounds.  I rode around the city and its suburbs on my bicycle in search of locations.  I didn’t have a car at the time, so I didn’t have much choice there, but having the bike meant I could stop anywhere I wanted to check out. 

I live in the Bay Area now.  San Francisco isn’t so much of a cyclist’s city, so I do a lot of scouting on foot.  For one of the stories in Working Stiffs, I wanted to kill someone on the Embarcadero.  So I started at one end and walked to the other poking about.  Sadly, I didn’t find anywhere useful but did find a site at Fort Mason.  I can’t recommend Fort Mason enough to kill someone (Fictionally speaking that is.  I don’t want anyone getting ideas and pointing fingers when it goes pear-shaped.  Alright?) 

The thing is that I don’t want to talk about the same old locations that everyone else uses in their books.  This is especially a problem with the San Francisco/Oakland Bay Area.  There are plenty of us scribblers around fighting for a fresh perspective on the town, so I really need to get my hands dirty.  Just like with methods of killing, writers want to keep it fresh and new for themselves and their readers.  Well, I know I do.

So I’m always on the hunt for a good location with plenty of originality.  It’s another reason I like to write about places outside of my usual stomping grounds.  Little known places provide a wealth of killer locales.  I have a tendency to go on road trips with Julie and the dog just so that we might check out somewhere I came across in a travel magazine or on TV.  I just have to have my hands on a killer location.

Don’t be surprised if one day, you sit down next to small yet affable stranger who’ll lean in close and whisper, “Do you know any good places where I can dump a body?”  Don’t panic.  It’s probably me.  Then again, it probably isn’t.

Simon Wood
PS: The new cover for Accident Waiting to Happen was unveiled to me.  Please take a peek here.
PPS: If you’re in the Bay Area on Sunday night, I’m involved in a Sisters in Crime Ghost Walk.  If you’re interested in attending, please click the hot link.