How to rite Killer Fiction

by Carolyn Wheat

  The new scene leads to another, and another, and pretty soon you've written a whole book.

  Action produces reaction inside the scene as well. The detective's mention of the Fat Man caused the nightclub singer to look away and bite her lip, as though she wanted to say something but didn't dare. She reacted to the detective's action.

  The detective's trip to the Fat Man brings out the goons who rough him up—a pretty strong reaction, and one that will cause the detective to suspect the Fat Man even more.

  Fixing Problem Scenes

  The first thing to look at when revising a scene is whether or not the viewpoint character has a clear scene goal. If not, that's the first thing to fix. If so, then what else could be wrong? A few scene problems and their solutions:

  Talking Heads

  Can we get those heads attached to actual bodies? Could those bodies move or at least twist their wedding bands or crack their knuckles or do something besides drink designer coffee? Props are a big help here; what can they hold in their hands? What physical action could they be doing as they talk?

  Talking in a Vacuum Dialogue is great. There's nothing better than letting your characters express themselves in their own voices. But you're writing a novel, not a screenplay, so those voices are attached to bodies and those bodies are in a physical location. Show me. Take me there. Take all five senses with you and let the characters experience the place so that I the reader can experience it, too. That's why I'm reading a novel instead of a screenplay.

  Exposition City

  Getting necessary background information into the hands of your reader is a challenge. Most writers know they don't want five densely written, information-packed paragraphs just plopped down in the middle of chapter two, so they write a nice snappy scene during which Sam and Joe discuss the exposition even though the plotline calls for them both to know all this stuff and therefore they have no really good reason to talk about it. Try very hard to let the necessary information seep into the story as needed. It's amazing how little we actually have to know in order to be hooked, and it's amazing how much more fun it is to slip exposition into the story through secrets and lies than laying it all out in one place.

  Over-the-Top Emotions To many beginning writers, louder is better. People in early scenes shout and sob, scream and cry their way through the action like scenery-chewing actors even though there isn't that much for them to yell about

  yet. Let the emotions, like the actions, build by showing simmering resentments underlying the shouting matches that ideally belong in Arc Three. Anger alone does not a conflict make.

  Lots of Talk, No Action We need some sort of decision or resolution at the end of a scene. We may all attend meetings at work where much is discussed and nothing is ever decided, but that shouldn't happen in a work of fiction. We can't table the discussion for another meeting; we need movement now and the scene must end in such a way that further action is inevitable. Don't make a phone appointment to see a witness, get in the car and go there. Now.

  The Incredible Jumping Conflict Our hero confronts his girlfriend, who also happens to be his boss as well as his main suspect in the death of their co-worker. Too many conflicts in one scene leave the reader wondering which one is really important right now. When a scene has several characters in it, try to focus on two main ones and let the others take a subordinate role for the moment. We need one scene goal and one resolution of that goal per scene, no more.

  Trailing Off into Nothingness "And then I went home and opened a can of soup for dinner and did my laundry and settled in to watch a little television." So what? If the scene ended back at the Fat Man's penthouse, then stop. Give the scene a beginning, middle, and snappy end that doesn't just trail off because, God forbid, the reader should miss a fascinating account of what the detective ate for dinner. Now, if eating that lonely dinner gives the detective time to reflect upon what he's learned and what he's going to do next, then we have a reaction and that's worth something, but if all it is is soup, it goes.

  Failing to Link Back to Main Plotline or Subplot My great insight into how to end chapters came from Dick Francis's Reflex. It's a nice complex read with five plotlines, one major and several minor but all interconnected. What Francis did was to end every chapter on a note that harked back to one of these plotlines, leading to last lines like "I wondered what I'd do with the rest of my life when my racing days were over." We were never far from the main thrust of the story and what it all meant to our hero. Writers who leave subplots dangling without bringing them back home run the risk of losing readers who wonder what they're reading this stuff for.

  Cliffhangers

  Here's where the distinction between scenes and chapters comes in handy. It's okay to end a chapter in the middle of a scene. It's also okay to combine several scenes into one chapter.

  This gives a writer extraordinary flexibility. You can start a scene in chapter five and break just at the point where one character pulls a gun on another, or where our detective finds a body, or where our suspense hero discovers that the man she thought was her father adopted her.

  Cut to chapter six, even though our character is exactly where we left her in chapter five.

  Why do this? Why not just keep writing and forget about the chapter break?

  Because one of the things a writer loves most is forcing the reader to read more than she intended to. "Can I please just finish this chapter?" I used to beg my mother when she wanted my help in the kitchen, and you can believe that any chapter that closed with a cliffhanger earned a few sneaky peeks into the next chapter in spite of my promise. That's part of what makes suspense, that sense of absolutely having to know what happens next, and ending the chapter in mid-scene just as the exciting part comes is an important trick of the trade.

  It shouldn't be overused. Cutting in mid-scene for the discovery of one body is great; when it happens the third time, the reader is likely to yawn instead of gasp. Too much artificial drama kills the real drama that ought to come from character, situation, and setting.

  "Meanwhile, back at the ranch," is a device writers working in multiple viewpoint can use to add to the cliffhanger suspense. Now not only is the reader left hanging while one character is in danger, but the writer switches the scene to another part of the story, another viewpoint character, so that we have to wait even longer to find out whether or not Pauline will be run over by that train whose tracks she's tied to. And if the writer's really on top of her game, she won't leave the ranch until something else dramatic happens there, and then she'll leave that story at the most exciting point.

  Narrative—The Alternative to Scene_

  What about those parts of the story that aren't written in scene form? How can the writer use narrative without lapsing into "telling" instead of "showing"?

  Very few writers choose a totally scene-oriented style. One who does is Gregory Mcdonald, the author of the Fletch series. Try picking up one of his fast-paced books to get a sense of what a novel without narrative looks like, and you'll see that while it's fun to read, it's also something you wouldn't want all novels to look like. Narrative has its place.

  Two questions about narrative: When should you use it and how do you put spin on the narrative ball?

  Uses of Narrative

  • To set the scene or establish location. Emma Lathen, who wrote wonderful Wall Street mysteries, always opened the books with deftly written "portraits" of the financial district that give the reader a context for the murder to come.

  • To cover a lot of temporal ground in a short space of words. The scene takes place in real time, but the whole book can't unless it covers a three-hour stretch of time. One of my favorite "time-cruncher" narrative lines occurs in Grace Paley's short story, "Ruthie and Edie." One segment of the story takes place in the Bronx when the girls are children; the next segment begins, "Fifty years later, they sat in Faith's kitchen..." Fifty years—gone in a puff of smoke, in three words from the hidden narrator.

  �
� To create the reaction section after a scene, during which the character reflects on the scene and chooses the next action. While it's possible to show a character's inner thoughts while the scene is going on, once the character is alone, we're not quite in scene any longer. We're summing up what he's thinking, what he's doing, and what he plans to do next, and that's narrative.

  Putting Spin on the Narrative Ball

  • Narrative doesn't mean just telling the reader what's happened. "And then he went home and ate his soup" is boring narrative. "He stared at the soup, which lay cold and congealed in the bowl. He'd come a long way from the days when he ate in four-star restaurants, handed twenties to parking lot attendants, squired beautiful women who wore dresses that sparkled in the candlelight. His whole life had come down to this: cold soup by the light of a black-and-white television set." He's still eating the same old soup, but now the soup means something. Making it mean something is what the art of narrative is all about.

  • Using language is part of beefing up the narrative. Bring out the vocabulary. Never let a wimpy verb creep in, or a generic noun. Cut and trim to the point where every single observation is a "closely observed detail" (in the words of John Gardner) that furthers the reader's understanding of the overarching emotional situation.

  • Emotion is the key. Whose emotion? Sometimes it's the character through whose sensibilities that particular narrative is filtered. Sometimes it's the emotion a hidden narrator brings to the tale. (The "voice" Emma Lathen used to describe Wall Street was one of an anthropologist with a wry sense of humor describing particularly outlandish tribal customs.)

  I know what you're thinking—"I'm supposed to create full-bodied scenes with deep character development, realistic dialogue, and dead-on description. Then I'm supposed to write narrative connectors that sparkle with wit and contain closely observed details. At the same time, I'm moving my plot toward its plot point, I'm planting and concealing clues, I'm keeping secrets and creating suspense, and I'm hurtling toward a take-no-prisoners ending."

  Sounds like work, doesn't it?

  The good news is that you don't have to do it all in a single draft. You can plan the writing you're going to do and you can revise once you're finished. But no matter how you approach the craft of writing, you will at some point have to examine your sentences, word byword, to make sure they're doing the job you want done. Editing at the sentence level can make the difference between getting published and being seen as an amateur without a sophisticated, developed style.

  Style_

  Novels, whether mystery or suspense, are made up of arcs. Arcs are made up of chapters, which are made up of scenes. Scenes in turn are comprised of paragraphs and sentences.

  Sentences are composed of words; the choice of the right words in the best arrangement is what we call style.

  Parts of Speech and How They Create Style

  Verbs

  Verbs are the lifeblood of fiction. People do things, and the way they do them says a great deal about who they are. So give the reader as clear a picture as possible by using verbs that really say something. Let your characters strut instead of just walking, let sounds crackle and pound, let waves and vehicles crash and thud and shudder.

  Get the "hads" out of your prose. Too many beginning writers clutter their sentences with weak verbs and unnecessary past tenses. "I walked down the street" is fine; "I had walked" is seldom needed. Let your characters do what they're going to do; don't let them "begin" to do it.

  Nouns

  Nouns should be as specific as possible, which is why a lot of writers use brand names to say something about character, which can work in some cases but can also be a lazy way of avoiding real character creation. Narrative especially needs what the great writing teacher John Gardner calls "the closely observed detail," the one little thing that sums up a human being. Raymond Chandler was especially good at this; some of his minor characters stay in our memories a long time because he chose one perfect detail to convey their essence.

  Make a list. Use the storyboard to write down everything you "see" in Mr. Big's office. Then hone the list by cutting the obvious, such as autographed pictures with the mayor and oversized ebony desks. Then pick one thing you haven't read anywhere else before and make that the centerpiece of your description.

  Adjectives

  If your nouns are nice and specific, why do you need adjectives? Because even a great noun can't always say it all. There's a difference between brand new sneakers and down-at-heel, unpolished oxfords. Like nouns, adjectives need specificity to be effective. "A pretty girl" doesn't say much, and neither does "intelligent green eyes." Give me a closely observed detail about that pretty face, or better yet, a mannerism that tells me the girl knows she's pretty. Give me a metaphor for the green eyes, or better yet, show me behavior that indicates intelligence.

  Like medication, adjectives shouldn't be overused. Three in a row is probably too many, unless they say three very different things about the object or person being described.

  Adverbs

  Adverbs are a lazy way out. Part of writing one's way into the story (more on this in chapter ten) is getting it down on paper as fast as you can, so mistakes are made. People walk "quickly," and say things "sarcastically" as a form of shorthand so that the writer remembers what she wanted to say without stopping to find a better way to say it right then.

  But in the rewrite, those adverbs need to be replaced by verbs that tell the whole story all by themselves and by dialogue that actually conveys sarcasm without having to tell the reader that's what it was meant to be. Let the character hustle or skitter or edge his way through the crowd, let him scramble like a quarterback or sidle like a snake. Let the dialogue speak for itself; if it's sarcastic enough, we won't need to be told that's what it was. Cut the adverbs and your prose will tighten like a Hollywood star after her first face lift.

  Metaphors can be fun. More fun than adverbs, anyway.

  Pronouns

  A second reader helps with pronoun problems. You need someone to circle that third or fourth "he" and put a note in the margin: "who he?"Then you'll know to go back into the sentence and clarify whether Mr. Big Bad Guy shot your hero or the other way around.

  Sentence Structure

  I know what the problem is. We're writing prose, which means that one word comes before another word, and so on. But we want to show a scene in which a man picks up a stick and talks to his friend at the exact same time. So we write, "Picking up the stick, John turned to Sam," or "As he picked up the stick, John turned to Sam."

  All right, that's not terrible, but it is clunky and the truth is, the reader doesn't actually care whether or not these two actions are happening at the same time. We've been reading for a long, long time now and we know that just because we read one thing first and the other thing second doesn't mean they happened separately. It's a convention, so that writing, "John picked up the stick. He turned to Sam and said" isn't going to confuse us.

  This comes up a lot in action scenes. We want to create the movie action experience, so our characters slide out of car seats, grab guns out of glove compartments, shoot off a round, duck the rounds that are coming back at them, and shelter their companions all in the same overheated sentence. It doesn't make for fast-paced writing, just confused writing.

  Short sentences that tell us precisely what's happening have more punch than long convoluted exercises in subordinate clauses. Any time your action prose is larded with "as" and "-ing" and "while," you're killing the jarring sense of sudden danger that is at the heart of action.

  Stupid Dialogue Tricks

  Dialogue should be the most natural thing in the world. I mean, we talk every day, right? We know how to do it and we hear other people doing it all the time, so how hard can it be to put talking on the page and make it sound natural?

  Harder than it looks for a few reasons. One is that if we put in all the banal, silly, dumb stuff people really talk about in real life we'd bore our readers to d
eath. A little bit of reality goes a long way on the printed page. Another problem is telling the reader who's talking so that they don't get confused. For some bizarre reason a lot of writers think they have to do much more than just identifying the speaker in order to write like real writers.

  So when it comes to revising dialogue and its attendant prose, here are a few things to avoid:

  • Repeating what the speaker just said. ("Harvey, don't you ever do that again," she scolded.) We just heard the character doing the scolding; why tell the reader that was what she was doing? Why not cut "scolded" and replace it with something more interesting, such as a description. ("Harvey, don't you ever do that again." Mama stood on the porch in her fluffy pink bunny slippers, her hair in rollers, hands on her hips.) We know it was Mama who spoke; we don't need "Mama said as she stood on the porch" or "said Mama, standing on the porch." Cut the extraneous little words and go for straightforward sentences.

  • Working overtime to find substitutes for "said." Characters who giggle, snort, chuckle, grimace, muse, mumble, or screech their way through dialogue should be taken out and shot. Dead. Again, just tell me what the character said, and if you want to add behavior, put it in the next sentence. ("I don't know why you think I had anything to do with the murder." She giggled and fingered her pink sweater; her nails were bitten to the quick.)

  • Using adverbs to make up for weak dialogue. Cut every single adverb and then look at the actual dialogue. Make it sound the way you told the reader it was.

  • Stopping the dialogue flow to give us interior monologue reacting to every word the non-viewpoint character says. Let the viewpoint character say what he's thinking, or, if his thoughts are the opposite of what he's saying, let him internalize once or twice, but let the dialogue take precedence.

  • Dialect is out. Hinting at a character's ethnic background or regional origins by very subtle means is in. The occasional foreign word or "y'all" will do, and by all means, don't spell funny. Editors hate funny spelling. So do intelligent readers.