Monthly Archives: March 2012

Confess… and Reoffend

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Let’s face it, you’re not going to get your detective to give the answers in front of a bunch of toffs and servants in the drawing room, are you?  Unless you’re writing some sort of parody of golden age detective fiction, that is.  But you could just as well fall into other, equally unrealistic traps.  How many times have you watched, or read the words of a villain explaining exactly how he did it while he taunts the hero at gunpoint?  Come on!  In real life, he’d just shoot and run, and hope the ballistic experts were going to have an off-day…

Endings will always be tricky in the crime genre, because there will be lots of knots to unravel, lots of facts to confirm or deductions to explain.  You probably know the old writing advice ‘show not tell.’  But inevitably your ending will involve a lot of telling the reader how it all happened.

Here are some points to bear in mind:

Practice makes…  well, you know.  Making dialogue sound natural is one of the skills you have to develop, and especially when characters may be explaining or summing up to one another.  Best never to start these bits with the phrase, ‘What I don’t understand is this…’

Your readers need the whole answer, but your characters may not.  You may be able to spread out your explanations, spread them around, so to speak. Don’t make the Inspector stand and spell out everything in one go to the sergeant.  Answers can come to the reader from a variety of mouths.

Don’t ignore other aspects of ending a book.  Novels are based around character, so we expect character development as the story progresses.  How did the crime and investigation affect your characters?  What have they learnt or what has changed them?  It’s not all about the puzzle solving element, after all.

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One day, in the possibly distant future, you’ll have completed a book, and you’ll have edited and re-edited, and generally got sick of the whole damn thing.  You’ll be wishing you’d taken up painting instead…

That will be the time to start again on the next one.  If you seriously want to be a professional crime writer, then you’re likely to need to create a whole series.  Check out your local bookshop or library if you’re lucky enough to have one.  Some authors have a whole shelf or more just to themselves.

Despite the best efforts of all law abiding citizens and law enforcement agencies, crime never sleeps.  Nor does the crime writer…

Know whom to trust

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We writers are solitary types, aren’t we?  The genius in his garret, inspiration flowing, creating the masterpiece that will overwhelm its readers; and if it doesn’t overwhelm them, then, well, presumably that’s their problem:  they just aren’t sensitive enough to get it…

Yeah, yeah, nice idea, Mr S Taylor Coleridge.  Way to make a writer feel special!  Maybe we can forgive the implied elitism from someone writing in the days of mass illiteracy and a rigid class system, but it won’t wash nowadays, will it?  If you want people to pay for your book, you’ve got to write one that meets their expectations. How many Romantic Poets have you seen on a bestseller list recently?

Which means that getting advice and feedback is going to be a necessary part of trying to make it as a writer.  Your innate genius is not enough.  Sorry.

But whose advice can you trust?  After all, what appeals to readers varies so much from individual to individual.  Now, a qualified English teacher is a great bet if you are unsure about punctuation, and she’ll have a mass of reading experience to draw on when giving all sorts of literary advice, but that won’t guarantee she is always right.  You need more than one person to help you.

My advice?

  1. Don’t start showing work too soon; give yourself enough time to work, rework, improve, learn and work out where you are going.  Don’t confuse yourself by asking for advice when you’ve barely started.
  2. Take feedback from different sources, but make sure it is from people who are willing to be honest.  You don’t need a sample of hundreds, but you do need more than four or five.
  3. Get people to write their notes on a printout of your work.  It forces them to reflect more carefully and to be more specific with their comments.
  4. Consider feedback as a way for you to look at your own work through fresh      eyes.  You may find you have to be brutal with cuts and changes. But have faith in your own judgement, too.  Sometimes the best person to trust is yourself.  Don’t make changes you really feel you don’t agree with.  You may not be a poetic genius.  But it’s your book.

Action Point Three:  Pick a fiction book that you haven’t read and of a type you wouldn’t normally choose.  One of your spouse’s or partner’s books could be ideal.  Read the first chapter and write down your comments, just as if the author had asked you for feedback.  Be as specific as you can.  You are not allowed to say things like, ‘I didn’t like it because war books bore me.’  Keep your notes so you can use them in future to show the sort of feedback you are seeking on your work.

Hurt the one you love…

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How do you grip your readers?  Some writers say that a story can be broken down into stages and that the stages should get more and more exciting until just before the end.  It goes like this:

Situation – Complication – Crisis – Climax – Resolution

Or like this:

Meet the characters – Bad things – Very bad things – Last chance for rescue –

So that’s how they escaped!

Now sometimes these stages get mixed up, so in a crime book we often find a corpse or see someone in danger right from the start:  bad things can be part of the situation, or you can jump in with a crisis before returning to the situation in your next chapter, telling it as a sort of flashback.  You can see that approach in some of the sample chapters on this site.

And of course you can even break down different episodes in the same way, so that every climax is a cliffhanger:  someone’s in jeopardy and the reader’s wondering how he’ll get out of it…

Which means that if you (and the reader) care about your characters, you have to hurt the ones you love.  Or at the very least, put them in danger of being hurt…

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And then again, there’s your favourite chapters, there’s the bits you wrote that you are most proud of, there’s those strokes of poetic genius that you stare at admiringly on your laptop screen, wondering how such wonderful phrases could ever have popped into your brain…

You know, you might just have to be prepared to edit them out.  You might find, great as they are, they don’t quite fit your narrative, they’re out of character, they belong in a totally different book, or that nobody else thinks they’re as good as you do.

As Sir Arthur Quiller Couch told his students, nearly one hundred years ago,

‘Murder your darlings.’

Hurt the ones you love…

Action point four:  If you are writing a novel, take each chapter you have written and ask yourself in which of the five stages shown above it fits. If you are writing short stories, use the same approach and break a story or two down into its stages.  Do you have enough crises or cliffhangers to keep the reader gripped?