How to Write a Mystery
Page 23
Oddly enough, because we started working when we lived five hundred miles apart, it is still easier for us to work in different rooms, even when we are in the same house. The reason for this appears to be the fact that we get off track when in the same room. We use text, emails, and phone calls to discuss and test various aspects of a given book, sending material back and forth until both parties are satisfied. Sometimes that goes quickly, and at other times it could take several days of exchanging viewpoints.
One helpful technique often used by collaborators is a storyboard. They agree first on the information they post there: pictures of the setting, information about the characters, how they dress if historical, what they might look like. Clues might go up on the board, along with the murder weapon, the rooms and their furnishings, where the characters live, or venues where the action takes place. This makes it possible for each person to draw on the same material. Others keep a notebook with similar information, or even a file of three-by-five cards. This also helps the collaborators to keep the single-person point of view.
It comes down, really, to finding out early on what your individual strengths and weaknesses are, and how best to share your individual talents. Using a system that isn’t comfortable as you work together will create unnecessary problems, both in the writing and in the atmosphere in which you write. This should be your first priority.
Next, we learned very quickly that ego is unhelpful. Where there was a deadlock, we ended it by figuring out what was best for the story. After all, it’s the book you are writing that matters: that’s why it’s called collaborating. When ego creeps in, the reader hears two voices. And ego rearing its head can bring pressures to bear that will affect the partnership. You are supposed to be working toward a common goal, and it really isn’t important who had the best idea or thought of the best ending. When one partner wants to impose their will on any part of the process, either because they feel they know best or they feel their prose is too brilliant to cut, it is no longer a collaboration.
Another of the early lessons we learned was to let the characters make decisions, rather than imposing choices on them. That led to unexpected pathways we hadn’t foreseen in our plotting. It gave the book life. And this applies to writing in general, not just collaboration. But there is sometimes a natural tendency in collaborating to control the characters, because two people are sharing in their creation. “Let’s have her do this, while he does that.” When we look instead at the characters as people, their own characteristics, personalities, and yes, even their secrets begin to surface.
We’ve mentioned single voice and two voices, but we should say more about that. Books written by one person have a single voice: that of the author. In collaborations, the goal should be the same: to come across as one writer, not two. Two voices feel like two points of view, and distracts from the impact your story ought to be having. When readers begin to guess which of you is speaking at any given time, they’re no longer concentrating on the book itself. More to the point, when an editor is distracted, you could lose a sale.
A word on plot and plotting: These have to be as tight for two people working together as they must be for a writer working alone. Tangents can be very tempting. But again, the end goal is the story, and while one partner really wants to throw in Mallorca because they just got back from there, does it really suit the story you are trying to tell? It isn’t ego so much as excitement about a holiday, but it can cause as much trouble. A plot can be adjusted as you learn more about where it is going, and it’s okay to try out an idea in the plotting, to see if the bow and arrow could have killed the victim when originally you’d considered poison. But these must be tested, to be sure the change works and doesn’t cause trouble closer to the end. A single author often develops an inner editor, who can warn, “Great idea, but save it for the next book.” This objectivity is even more important for two writers, for the simple reason that sometimes one can persuade the other too easily when in fact the change isn’t for the best. There’s a big difference between improving and straying off target. Again, your mantra should be: What is best for the book?
Never assume that you don’t need a written agreement until that book contract is signed. Single writers have only themselves to consider. When there are two working together, whatever your relationship, it’s surprising how quickly difficulties can arise—and having already-agreed-upon rules will make resolving these issues easier. What the copyright will show, what name to use, how the royalties will be distributed, what financial allowance you will give to research, travel, and promotion, how expenses will be met, even what will happen to the partnership if one of you dies. Do residual royalties go to the surviving partner, or are they shared with the heirs of the deceased? These questions matter.
And don’t forget to consider what will happen to earnings—and to your pen name—if you stop writing together. Or if one wants to do something on their own as well as collaborate, and the other doesn’t. It can happen.
There’s something else that counts: respect for one’s partner. Whatever is going on behind the scenes, never broadcast it in public, or worse still, hint at it. You have a brand here, just as a single writer does, and you want to protect that brand. Even after a privately acrimonious split, the public face mustn’t change. What purpose is served by damaging the reputation of the name on the cover or the work itself?
Remember, too, that you are running a business, not a hobby. Both parties need to read contracts, understand them, and learn how publishing, publicity, and marketing actually work. These should never be left to your agent, no matter how good that agent may be—and they shouldn’t be left to just one partner, either. Contracts are the rules you have agreed upon with the publishing house and therefore are essential to how you work and how you are paid.
All in all, collaboration can be very satisfying—and a challenge as well as a lot of fun. On the other hand, it isn’t for everybody. The time to find that out is sooner rather than later. The idea can be appealing, it can seem to be quite workable—but the personalities of the two people considering it may be all wrong. If that happens, better to acknowledge it and stop. The book you are expecting to write won’t work out, because you will be pulling apart on issues rather than pulling together. That’s the whole point of collaborating—finding a way of working as smoothly as possible together toward the creation of a great mystery.
BRADLEY HARPER
Chekhov’s advice, “Don’t tell me the moon was full. Tell me of the moonlight’s reflection from the shattered glass,” is so powerful. It gives my brain a sharp image that transports me into the story.
Sounds. Sounds are universal, transcending all language (other than spoken words themselves). A baby’s cry or a door squeaking open on a dark night needs no translation. I got it.
Smells. Often overlooked. As a retired physician, I can tell you that smell is our most primitive sense and goes directly to the basic animal brain that reigns over our strongest emotions. Think of cookies coming out of the oven on a cold winter afternoon and you’re back in your grandmother’s kitchen with pigtails, begging to lick the bowl. Smells have powerful emotional context, and as the olfactory nerve has no intermediate stops, it is a highway to our emotional bank vault. Use smells sparingly, but they can be a powerful ace in the hole when you want your reader nailed to a scene until you’re done with them.
Touch and taste. Taste is a wingman to smell, but touch has a wealth of opportunities, and not just in sixty shades of purple prose. Like smell, it should be used sparingly or it loses its punch. Our body is sheathed in this exquisitely sensitive organ called skin. One drop of cold water on the back of your neck sends a shock wave through you, no matter how thick your jacket. One of my favorite words is “frisson,” a sudden shiver of excitement. Provide an apt description of a light touch and your reader will lean into the book. They’re there.
Tie-Ins and Continuing a Character
Playing in someone else’s sandbox.
The novelization is perhaps the least recognized, most-often derided form of professional fiction writing; it’s also one of the most difficult to do well. Only slightly more respected is the original novel based on a TV show or a movie franchise.
Both novelizations and original licensed novels are considered “tie-in” books. This includes novels or short stories using characters from a TV show or film, but also continuing the work of a deceased author, often with an arrangement with the estate.
An organization of professional writers who find themselves “playing in someone else’s sandbox” was founded by myself and television writer and producer Lee Goldberg (who wrote both scripts and tie-in novels for Monk and Diagnosis: Murder). The International Association of Media Tie-In Writers gives annual awards, in the fashion of the Mystery Writers of America Edgars and the Private Eye Writers of America Shamuses, in various categories. The reason for these awards is that, quality aside, such books are seldom honored elsewhere.
In recent years, a more respectable aspect of tie-in writing has seen the likes of Robert B. Parker continuing Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, and top talents Reed Farrel Coleman and Ace Atkins among those continuing Parker’s own work on Jesse Stone and Spenser, respectively. Anthony Horowitz and Jeffery Deaver are among big names taking on James Bond, the Ian Fleming series having been previously continued by Raymond Benson and John Gardner, among others. Listing Sherlock Holmes authors (beyond Arthur Conan Doyle) is a task I won’t attempt, but certainly Nicholas Meyer was instrumental in reviving mainstream interest in the Great Detective.
Major names continuing major series by major deceased authors is surprising only because more of it didn’t happen sooner. Gaining entry to that club comes about chiefly when some high-powered editor makes a phone call and—in a refreshing change of pace—pitches the author. Most practitioners of mystery writing should understand that approaching an editor about, say, continuing Miss Marple or Lew Archer is not going to get much out of that editor beyond an eye roll.
Even the often-looked-down-upon tie-in field itself is a fairly exclusive club… or at least one that’s hard to get into without an invite. A handful of specialists are known to editors as go-to tie-in writers, particularly in science fiction. Other writers, again largely in the s-f field, have networked at fan conventions to talk to editors and agents and get a shot at submitting proposals.
If you are a published writer with at least a little success, you might approach an editor you work with and inquire about getting in touch with another editor at their publisher about your interest in writing a tie-in. But mostly you get a phone call out of the blue, from an editor or your agent, after an editor has read something of yours that makes you seem just right for doing a novel based on one famous TV show or another.
Copyright will be held by the license holder—in the case of TV and movies, often the studio; in the case of continuation of a late author’s series, their estate. Whether you receive a royalty or not is to be negotiated, but often you’ll be paid a flat fee.
My path into tie-in writing demonstrates the kind of circuitous route that can take you into tie-in writing. I was the writer of the Dick Tracy comic strip when Warren Beatty adapted it into a movie; as a consultant on the film, I heard a tie-in novel was going to happen. I lobbied through my agent to get the novel, and did, though the experience was a trial by fire, to say the least. I learned that the licensor has the muscle—my pedigree as the writer of the strip carried no weight. I had to “follow the script out the door” and add nothing to it.
(I had a similar experience writing a novelization of the screenplay of Road to Perdition, even though the film was based on my own graphic novel.)
In 1992, an editor at the Tribune Syndicate I’d clashed with fired me from the Tracy strip, which I’d been writing for fifteen years. I called my agent and said, “Get the word out that I am available for movie novelizations.” The Dick Tracy novel had sold 800,000 copies, after all.
Nothing happened for a while, but finally my agent called me and said, “The good news is Berkley wants you to write a novelization of the next Clint Eastwood movie, In the Line of Fire. The bad news is that they need it in ten days.”
“Yes” is the only word in the freelancer’s vocabulary, much as “no” is the only word in an editor’s vocabulary. This was before the internet was much help, and the screenplay (faxed to me) included multiple real locations. My wife, Barb, also a writer, made research trips to the library for me and phone calls to friends around the country for info about their localities. I hunkered down and came out only for meals, briefly. If I recall, I did three chapters a day. Later, when we listened to the audiobook of In the Line of Fire, I realized the amount of profanity increased in tandem with the hero’s own anxiety. So here’s a writing tip: if you’re having a nervous breakdown, have your protagonist experience one, too.
Word got around that I was reliable and fast. The latter became a problem, because having a reputation as someone to call in a pinch can make for a harrowing writing life. But for the next decade and a half, I would get one or two novelizations per annum. I was extremely lucky—most of the scripts I novelized were well-written and became major movies, among them Saving Private Ryan, Air Force One, and American Gangster.
Others were just plain fun—I did all three Mummy movies, for example, which were a combination of Indiana Jones and Universal Studios horror. As a mystery writer, I am somewhat typed, which is fine—being a known quantity has its advantages. But as a tie-in writer, I’ve been able to write science fiction (Waterworld), war stories (Windtalkers), espionage (I Spy), and sword and sorcery (The Scorpion King). I learned a lot, working in different genres, which is one of the joys and advantages of tie-in writing (although you can become typecast there as well).
Movie tie-in writing requires you to find something in the material that can excite you as much as if you had come up with it yourself. In The Pink Panther, I wrote about Inspector Clouseau as if Peter Sellers were starring, not Steve Martin. In Maverick, I pictured James Garner as young Bret Maverick, not Mel Gibson. In U.S. Marshals, a sequel to the film version of TV’s The Fugitive, I started chapters in the omniscient voice of the narrator (William Conrad—“Fate moves its huge hand”). As a big X-Files fan, I was delighted to land the second X-Files film and work with the show’s creators (a rarity).
Finding a way in, with a movie novel, is crucial. I had turned down several jobs, not liking the scripts, when another dog came in. I asked my agent, “Do I dare turn this one down?” He said, “Sure. You’ll just never get anything offered to you again.” So I did it. The movie was Daylight, a disaster film about a tunnel collapsing. I approached it as a documentary with alternating first-person sections, as if the survivors were talking to an off-camera narrator. I did not use the hero’s POV, to give the illusion that he may not have survived (spoiler alert: he does). Daylight turned out to be possibly my best movie novel.
My approach has always been to try to make the novelization seem like the book the movie was based on. I vary from some writers of movie novelizations in that I don’t follow the dialogue in the screenplay religiously. I use it, but I expand and reshape it (and, frankly, sometimes ignore it). Screenplay writing isn’t novel writing. You have to add backstory and interior monologue because (a) it needs to read like a book, not a transcribed screenplay, and (b) it needs to be book length, say three hundred manuscript pages minimum, where a screenplay is closer to one hundred pages. A screenplay may jump from A to C and get away with it, but the novelist must provide the missing B.
More rewarding, at least artistically, was the chance to write original novels. My CSI books were bestsellers and got my name out to a wider audience. My agent had initially advised me not to put my real name on any tie-in books, novelizations included. Just having a byline on a tie-in was potentially career damaging. But I saw no reason not to have my name on a book tied to a big Hollywood movie—what’s th
e downside of writing Saving Private Ryan?
A lot of the audience for tie-in novels is young—middle school, mostly. Though these books aren’t sold as young adult, many young adults read them. As an author of several award-winning juvenile books—a guy named Spillane—once told me, “If you get a reader at a young age, you have ’em forever.” I believe that. I also believe in putting my own name on tie-ins—it keeps me honest.
Writing original novels based on TV series requires having real familiarity with the show or bingeing it on DVD or streaming services until you do. Also necessary is resourcefulness.
I signed on to CSI early in its first season, and was provided scripts and screeners, which led to long sessions of notetaking. Many shows have “bibles,” with background info on characters and general material about the series, but CSI didn’t have that. Early on, the show was about the crimes and the forensics, with the recurring cast secondary. Soon the actors and the public conspired to flip that dynamic, but initially the TV characters were fairly blank. I had to latch on to every morsel about the people that the series deigned to give me.
Dark Angel, an s-f series, had been on the air two years when I got the call. I’d never seen it, and again had to hit the ground running. Not having time to watch two years’ worth of episodes, I watched the pilot movie several times and wrote a prequel to the show. Oddly, the series—fairly popular and already picked up for season three—was unexpectedly canceled. I had two books left on the contract, and was asked to wrap up the series, one novel resolving the second season’s closing cliffhanger, the other tying a bow on the show’s entire story arc. So, as it happened, I wrote the first and last episodes of Dark Angel.