Month: January 2020

Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction

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There’s an article by Lawrence Block republished in yesterday’s issue of the Writer’s Digest which was originally in the same magazine twenty years ago.  Lawrence Block, born 1938, is an American crime writer who is best known for a series set in New York about the recovering alcoholic and private investigator, Matthew Scudder and the gentleman burglar, Bernie Rhodenbarr.

Lawrence Block

I quote from Mr Block’s article as follows: “A couple of years ago, two friends of mine, a man and woman I’d known for most of a decade, made the papers. They did so in a rather spectacular fashion when the husband, a Wall Street stock analyst, murdered the wife, drove around for a while with her in the trunk of the car, dumped her at the side of the road, and was in very short order apprehended and charged with homicide. At the time of his arrest, he was wearing women’s underwear.

“Eventually the case came to trial, but not before he had been released on bail, married someone else, beat up the new wife, and had his bail revoked. He stood trial, was convicted, and was in jail awaiting sentencing when he rather abruptly died, evidently of AIDS. The new wife attended his funeral service in the company of a woman who’d been in the news a while back when a former Miss America stood trial on a charge of using unlawful influence to get a judge to lower her lover’s alimony payments to a former wife. The new wife’s companion at the funeral was the daughter of the judge in question, and achieved some local notoriety by testifying against the former Miss America. What she’s doing in this story is beyond me, but I guess everybody has to be someplace.

“After the funeral, the wife and her friend hurried back to the deceased’s house and stole everything they could carry.”

Mr Block, discussing this with a friend, said that it was a lot like a soap opera.

“’No,’ the friend said. ‘No, soap opera has a certain internal logic to it. That’s how you can distinguish between it and Real Life.’

“Fiction has to make sense. Life does not, and I suppose it’s just as well, or vast chunks of life would bounce back from the Big Editor in the Sky with form rejection slips attached to them. When we want to praise fiction, we say that it’s true to life, but it’s not that often the case. Life, unlike fiction, gives every indication of operating utterly at random, with no underlying structure, no unifying principles, no rules of drama. I think it was Chekhov who pointed out that it was dramatically essential that any cannon that appeared onstage in Act 1 had damn well better be fired before the final curtain. Life doesn’t work that way. In life, onstage cannons are forever silent, while others never seen go off in the wings, with spectacular results. Characters play major roles in the opening scenes, then wander off and are never heard from again. Perhaps it all balances out, perhaps there’s some sort of cosmic justice visited in another lifetime or another world, but all that is hard to prove and not too satisfying dramatically.

“What I’m really getting at, though, is not so much that life is a tale told by an idiot as that fiction had better be otherwise. And, simply because fiction has to make sense, we take for granted certain things that hardly ever happen in real life.

“Consider premonitions. Now, everybody has premonitions from time to time—the sudden illogical hunches that lead us to stay off an airplane, bet a number, or cross a street. Every once in a while a premonition actually turns out to be warranted—the number comes up, the plane comes down, whatever.  But in the vast majority of instances the premonition is a bum steer or a false alarm. The warning that came to us in a dream, and that we did or didn’t act upon, winds up amounting to nothing at all. The lottery ticket’s a loser. The plane lands safely.  Not so in fiction. Every premonition means something, though not necessarily what it seems to mean; in fiction, we ignore omens and hunches at our peril, and to our chagrin.

“Just look at the supermarket tabloids. They usually run extensive predictions around the first of the year, with famous psychics telling us what to expect over the next 12 months. Except for the can’t-miss shotgun predictions (“I foresee that somewhere in the world there will be a disaster, with great loss of life. Washington will be rocked with charges of political corruption and financial mismanagement. And, on the Hollywood scene, I see a marriage breaking up.”), the predictors hardly ever get anything right.

“In fiction, they almost always get almost everything right, and it never occurs to us to regard this as unrealistic.  ‘Oh, this is silly,’ a character says. ‘I’m not superstitious. I’m going to walk under this ladder.’ Or break this mirror, or forbear to throw this spilled salt over my shoulder, or whatever. And he does, and we know something’s going to happen to him before his story’s over. We may not be superstitious ourselves. We may detour around ladders, just on the general principle that it couldn’t hurt, but we don’t take the whole thing seriously.  Not in real life we don’t. In fiction, we know better.

“And what does all this mean?   Because I’m not sure just what it all means, or precisely what implications it has for us as writers of fiction. It could probably be argued that one of the reasons fiction exists, a reason it is written and a reason it is read, is that it is orderly and logical, that it makes sense in a way that life does not. Frustrated with the apparent random nature of the universe, we take refuge in a made-up world in which actions have consequences.

“Truth, as we’ve been told enough, is stranger than fiction. Of course it is—because it can get away with it. It flat-out happens, and it’s undeniable, so it doesn’t have to make sense. If my friend’s story, replete with uxoricide and transvestism and the remarriage and the beating of the new wife and the trial and the death, if all of that were placed without apology between book covers and presented as fiction, I’m sure I’d have tossed the book aside unfinished; if I made it all the way through, I’d surely be infuriated by the virus ex machina ending. The loose ends would annoy me and the inconsistencies would drive me nuts.

“But it’s fact. It happened. I can’t dispute it on dramatic grounds. I can’t say it’s improbable, or illogical. It happened. It’s what is. I may not like it, I may be saddened or horrified by it, but I can’t lay the book aside because it’s not a book. It’s real.

“I’ve seen writers react to criticism that their stories were implausible, that they relied too greatly on coincidence, that they were unresolved dramatically, by arguing that their fiction had been faithful to actual circumstance. ‘How can you say that?’ they demand. ‘That’s how it happened in real life! That’s exactly how it happened!’

“Indeed, and that’s the trouble. If real life were fiction, you couldn’t get the damn thing published.”

Deciding on the Point of View

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There is an article of the Writer’s Digest website, ‘Writing Multiple Points of View’ by Wendy Heard which caught my attention because the novel I’m completing now will have two narrators.  Ms Heard holds a Bachelor’s degree in Studio Art, emphasising painting, and a Master’s degree in Education.  She is a member of Sisters in Crime, International Thriller Writers, and Mystery Writers of America, is a contributor at Crimereads.com, and co-hosts the Unlikable Female Characters podcast.

Wendy Heard

Ms Heard says, “When a story calls for more than one narrator, it’s exciting (at first). In a way, starting a new book is like diving into a new relationship—a potentially abusive relationship with a high-maintenance narcissist who demands you spend every moment obsessing about them.  I’ve now been in two multiple points of view relationships, one with The Kill Club, a thriller released December 2019, and one with She’s Too Pretty to Burn, a YA thriller out in 2021. Going through the rounds of revisions on these two projects taught me a lot, and I hope what I’ve learned is useful to you.  That said, let’s dive into some suggestions I have for writing multiple POV projects.

  1. Determine your primary POV.

Even if you have just a couple of narrators, one of them will likely carry the theme of the book and serve as the dominant POV. I spent a lot of time figuring this out with She’s Too Pretty to Burn, where I had dual narrators with almost the same amount of real estate. If you’re not sure who your primary narrator should be, consider the logline for your book in terms of the following structure: “X person must do Y or [some bad thing] will happen.” For example, “Harry Potter must defeat Voldemort or the wizarding world will be ruined forever.” Sometimes putting your logline into this sentence frame will help determine who’s carrying the central conflict in the story.  In general, I’ve heard from many different people that it helps a reader orient themselves in a multiple POV story when the primary narrator goes first and gets Chapter One.

  1. Distinguish your characters’ voices.

First, figure out if you’d like to differentiate the POVs by making one first person and the other(s) third person, one past tense and the other(s) present tense, one limited and the other(s) omniscient, etc. Going back and forth between limited and omniscient in third person is high art, and I admire anyone who can pull it off.

Next, consider the characters themselves. If you have a character who is musical, they’ll likely be quite auditory and their descriptions of settings will include sounds as much as imagery. If you have a character who’s younger, their internal cultural references, comparisons, and slang will be different than an older character. If one character is a doctor, they might notice physical aspects of the people around them more than, say, a glass blower.

I’d also recommend journaling a list of sayings and phrases used by each character. As you do, consider making each character’s thinking style vastly different. One person can be more poetic, with longer sentences containing more clauses. Another character might be a more direct person who tells it exactly like it is with no embellishment. The more work you do here, the more authentically each of these voices will read.

  1. When working with many points of view…

First of all, I recommend pouring a stiff drink and staring at your computer moodily. This is the only way to commence writing more than three points of view.

Some stories must be told from many perspectives. In this case, you’ve already determined who your protagonist will be, so now you’re trying to figure out how to fit all the other perspectives into the story. I was in this position for The Kill Club, and I developed a strategy that helped me stay organized: I considered the main character’s POV as the primary and all the other ones a secondary POV I called a “composite” POV. When I was outlining the book (see next bullet), I had one list of plot points and story beats for the protagonist and one for the composite, and I plugged narrators in based on who would be the best narrator for the story beat in question.

  1. Beat sheets and outlines for multiple POVs

I work with Save the Cat beat sheets, but I know there are many other outlining tools in use. Regardless of methodology, a question arises: How do I know which character should tell which part of the story?

I’d advocate for giving the largest story beats to your protagonist. If the heart of the book happens away from your hero and with someone else, the question begs to be asked: why not make that other person the hero?

Some other things I’d advocate for doing in your protagonist’s POV: major relational beats, plot-altering twists (unless the point of the twist is that you’re showing something that will add suspense if hidden from the protagonist), thematic beats, and moments that could contribute to character development if given to the hero.

If you have dual POVs, with both being almost equally weighted, I’d recommend huge plot points such as the inciting incident, the midpoint, and the dark night of the soul happen in both perspectives. If possible, the two narrators could be in scene together when these moments happen, or, if they’re carrying parallel narratives, such as in past/present tense books, they could each experience separate major plot points.

It’s important to remember that all POV characters need to go through a full plot, and the character growth needs to be well-developed in each, even if they only get a handful of chapters. By designating someone as a point of view character, you’ve said they are crucial to the reader’s experience of this story. This brings me to my final piece of advice.

  1. Sometimes, maybe it’s not necessary.

I wrote a book that started out as multiple POVs and ended up a single-narrator project. Sometimes, after you’ve sat with the outline for a minute, you might realize that being inside the head of one of these characters, or some of them, is not necessary for a reader to fully experience this story. While it’s hard to reconsider the structure of a project once you’ve fallen in love with it, just like in relationships, it’s important to be open to all possibilities in those early drafting stages. Readers can sometimes find themselves bored or alienated by extra points of view.”

This discussion was interesting to me as it was suggested that having two POV’s in the novel I’m currently working on, instead of a single narrative by the protagonist, could increase the tension in the story.  This turns out to be correct, particularly as the two POV characters are very different, but they share a common interest in telling the story.

Emotional Danger

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On the Writer’s Digest blog there is a discussion by Amy Jones of the book by Jordan Rosenfeld, How to Write a Page Turner, about the use of emotional danger in writing.  Ms Rosenfeld is author of the suspense novels Women in Red, Forged in Grace and Night Oracle as well as seven writing guides,

Jordan Rosenfeld

In her book, Ms Rosenfeld says, “Danger is a master tension tool. When it’s present, your reader will have a difficult time looking away. What’s more, it’s a good way to build empathy for a character and to keep the story tension high.  Of course, like any element, you don’t want to overdo danger. If your character is always and endlessly in one horrible scenario after another, you may wear your reader down. You want to create just enough, as you’ll see in the examples below, to lock on to the reader’s heart and mind so they don’t stop reading.

“Physical danger is obvious; it needs little backstory or clarification. You can create it out of the circumstances at hand. Psychological and emotional danger are deeper and more complex forms of danger that require planning. They should be true to the dynamics between characters, whereas a natural disaster can have nothing to do with a character’s personality or choices.

“What do I mean by psychological danger, anyway? Another phrase for this, as mentioned above, is ’emotional danger.’ This is when a character stands to gain or lose a person’s trust, respect, love, affection, etc. When another character has the power to affect your protagonist’s marriage, livelihood, or standing in the community, you’ve entered the territory of psychological danger. The same is true when the antagonist terrorises, shames, or blackmails your protagonist, to name a few examples.

“Here’s a good example from Sara Pinborough’s thriller Behind Her Eyes. In it, frumpy, divorced, single mom Louise meets a man named David in a bar and makes out with him. The next day she learns he’s her boss at her new job. That alone is a form of psychological danger—a relationship with a boss could put one’s job in jeopardy. So she tries hard to squash any feelings for him, and then she finds out he’s also married, which creates a whole new kind of emotional danger as affairs come with consequences for multiple people.

“But then, one day, on her way to work, she runs into a woman, literally knocking her down. The woman turns out to be David’s wife, Adele. Adele, who doesn’t work and comes across as emotionally fragile, is hungry for a friend, and Louise can’t help herself, so she agrees to hang out with Adele. Adele asks that she not tell David, who she says can be a little controlling.

“Pretty soon, David begins to make romantic overtures to Louise again. He describes his marriage as unhappy, and Louise, suffering a major lack of affection, begins an affair with David despite her better intentions.

“Do you see where this is going? Louise is now in a secret friendship with David’s wife and in a secret affair with Adele’s husband. Emotional danger is written all over this situation, with many ways it can go wrong for Louise.”

The example seems a bit too contrived for my taste, and I believe I might have put the book down thinking that Louise is an idiot.  However, I think that the basic point about emotional tension is a good one.

Crime Writing

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The opinion, The Shadow of Violence, by Jane Casey appears in the winter 2019 edition of The Author. Ms Casey is the author of the award-winning Maeve Kerrigan series of crime novels.  Her most recent novel is Let the Dead Speak.

Jane Casey

Ms Casey takes exception to the Staunch Prize, founded by Bridget Lawless, screenwriter and author of educational material on violence.  The prize is awarded to books that do not feature violence against women.  Ms Lawless says the purpose of the award is to draw attention to the plethora of violence towards women, and make sense for exciting alternatives.

Ms Casey says, “Our genre may frequently feature murderous rage, but crime writers are renowned as a calm, close-knit and pleasant literary collective.  It takes a lot to get us agitated; we generally work through our darker feelings in our books.  Yet nothing has stirred us up more than the Staunch Prize.  The reaction of many crime writers has ranged from scepticism to hurt to actual outrage.  Crime writers are defensive.  Crime is a genre that struggles for critical respect, despite brilliant and inventive writing and enormous popularity with readers.  The Staunch Prize feels like a response to the bad old days when crime was thought of as low-grade and vulgar entertainment, designed to titillate and thrill, devoid of any merit.

“At a recent literary festival ion London, I suggested that it is the duty of writers who write contemporary crime novels to reflect society as it is at that moment.  We live in a state of perpetual change; what appals one generation barely ruffles the feathers of the next.  Universal crimes – the ones that echo through the generations – are crimes against people.  These stories are as old as time; not telling then does not make them go away.  Telling stories about these crimes to a new audience has an important function: this is part of the world and it must be understood like any other threat to our safety and well being.

“The Staunch Prize website asserts that through their work, crime writers are perpetuating rape myths.”  (The rape myth, based on academic research, is that jurors are reluctant to convict ‘ordinary’ men of rape because such men do not fit the idea of rapists that jurors have internalised from stories and popular culture.)  She continues, “But contemporary crime writers, I would argue, no longer perpetuate the myth that only ‘stranger rape’ is ‘real rape’. We do the opposite.

“With the rise of the domestic noir genre of psychological thriller, crime-writing has moved inside the home to focus on exactly those behaviours that the Staunch Prize suggests it obscures.  Gaslighting, emotional abuse, coercive control, domestic violence, rape: all of these are real crimes that affect women (and often men) behind closed doors.  Exploring them in fiction is a way of placing them in context for victims and those of us in society who have never had to endure similar experiences – even, eventually jurors.

“A 2013 study by psychologists at York University in Toronto found that reading two genres in particular was a significant predictor of greater ‘interpersonal sensitivity’ – romance and suspense/thrillers.  Reading crime makes us more empathetic rather than blunting our sensibilities.  A 2010 Harris poll found that crime and thrillers were the most popular novels for both men and women, with 57% off female readers enjoying them (compared to 39% of male readers).”

As a footnote: Dorothy, a junior doctor, in my novel, Achieving Superpersonhood: Three East African Lives, is raped by her supervisor, a senior consultant.  She goes public, winning public support, forcing the resignation of the consultant, who flees the country, and a financial settlement.

Creative Writing Tips

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The Writer’s Relief website has some worthwhile points about making the best use of one’s writing skills.  I have extracted some of the best points be]ow.

Sentence Length: Today’s reader tends to favour short sentence lengths—clear and direct writing rather than flowery, convoluted prose. It’s a busy world full of information, and simple, easy-to-read sentences with powerful verbs are appealing. Sentence length can have an enormous effect on your readers.  An example of effectively using short, powerful sentences to create an impact can be found in The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan: That night I sat on Tyan-yu’s bed and waited for him to touch me. But he didn’t. I was relieved.  But this paragraph, from A Farewell to Arms, shows Ernest Hemingway’s skill with more complex construction, giving the reader a sense of the character’s languor:  They left me alone and I lay in bed and read the papers awhile, the news from the front, and the list of dead officers with their decorations and then reached down and brought up the bottle of Cinzano and held it straight up on my stomach, the cool glass against my stomach, and took little drinks making rings on my stomach from holding the bottle there between drinks, and watched it get dark outside over the roofs of the town.

More Powerful Verbs: He ran through the crowd. I didn’t like my coffee.  These phrases might come off as emphatic when they’re uttered in conversation. But when text is our medium, the primary way we can emphasise the tone of the words is by making stronger word choices, like this: He sprinted through the crowd.  I hated my coffee.  Sometimes amping up a verb requires restructuring a sentence: He darted among the pedestrians. My coffee nauseated me.  And other times the verb choice will need to reflect a character’s dialect or personality:  He bullied his way through the crowd. I’m not relishing my coffee.  One other “problem area” to work on when you’re ramping up your verb choices is the dreaded adverb. Overusing adverbs is the equivalent of trying to do crunches by pushing yourself up with your hands—it’s a way of “helping” the main action, but it makes the results less dramatic. Sometimes adverbs are absolutely necessary, but when you can get rid of them, you should.

Unusual Words: Examples of creative word usage abound in The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer. This novel is first set in Paris on the brink of World War II. The young Jewish protagonist, Andras, learns he must quit school and return to his home in Hungary. He’s bummed out. When he gets to Hungary, he thinks, “Budapest was cobwebbed with memories…”  Most of us think of the word cobweb as a noun. “Look at those cobwebs! That corner is full of cobwebs!” However, Merriam-Webster notes a lesser-known usage of cobwebbed as an adjective. Few of us would say, “Look at that cobwebbed corner.” It feels awkward.  But in Ms. Orringer’s hands, cobwebbed is a revelation. Could she have written that Budapest was full of memories? Of course.  But cobwebbed is so much more powerful and evocative of Andras’s frame of mind. First, cobwebbed is more visual than full. Second, it’s more specific. Third, it evokes age—something forgotten, despairing, and maybe a touch repulsive. It also provides some eerie foreshadowing for what could, and does, happen to this young man during the Holocaust.

Setting: The settings or locales of books, stories, and poems can be just as important as characters, plot, and prose style in making a creative work bloom.  Does your story or book have a setting that comes to life? That is a character in and of itself?   In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain’s renowned 1884 novel, the Mississippi River and its environs come alive under the magical pen of Twain—a pre-Civil War pilot on that waterway. Twain contrasts the beauty of the Mississippi’s southern portion with the racism, scamming, and other not-so-beautiful things that happen in and near there. But the river is also a place to have fun—and for Jim to possibly find freedom from slavery.

Point of View:  Point of view can be defined as the narrative perspective from which a story or novel is told. Many editors and publishers will tell you that a novel written from the first person point of view (I, we) is often a sign of an inexperienced writer, and—toss!—into the trash it goes. Check your local bookstore and take note of how many best-sellers are written in first person. They exist, but novels are far more often written in third-person narrative, and for good reason. In first person, the character is also the narrator, either playing a central (active) role or a peripheral (sideline) part. As the first-person narrator, you have but one point of view to offer, and this can be limiting. There’s simply less opportunity to bring depth to the story. On the other hand, a first-person narrative creates an undeniable intimacy with the reader.  The second person point of view is a difficult and uncommon style to pull off successfully. Imagine an entire novel where the character, narrator, or even the reader is referred to as “you.”  Often considered an experimental form, this type of narrative would be nearly impossible to sustain through a full-length novel and would be more successful in a short piece.  Storytelling from a third person point of view (he, she) offers a clear distinction between the author and the characters, allowing the author complete freedom to travel through the story and its characters. The narrator is not a character and can therefore comment on every aspect if so desired.  There are several alternatives to the third person point of view: the omniscient point of view, where the narrator is all-knowing; the limited point of view, where the narrator knows only one character; and the objective point of view, where the narrator offers no opinions or value judgements.  Once you’ve chosen your point of view, consistency is a matter of importance. Switching POVs can cause confusion for the reader and interrupt the flow of the story. If you do choose to use multiple POVs, make it obvious when a new character takes over the storytelling.