On Writing

By Jay Stringer

I've been thinking a lot about craft lately. Or rather, I've been struggling with it.

I have a few projects that are overdue, with people waiting on me to get my ass in gear, and it's been a fight to try and get them done. It's not block. The stuff is in my head and I know most of what happens to the characters. It's more a lack of form, a lack of the structure that will make the work sing.

I've caught flack before for saying I don't believe in writers block. I still don't. What I do believe in is distraction. And right now I'm cornering the market in that. This month I visit New York and turn 30. I have a couple of health issues and, king of them all, I'm getting married. The gurrl and I are planning the whole thing ourselves, down to writing the wedding service and vows, and that's taken a lot of doing.

So amid all of that, I can cut myself a little slack about all of the work I've not finished. I know I'll get back on track. But in the meantime I decided to explore craft a bit more, to try and give my scattered brain a little more focus. I bought a handful of books about writing, and started looking up more interviews and documentaries on the subject.

Some of the books come highly recommended and I look forward to reading them. There's a King, a Maass and a Stein. Each suggested by people that I trust. The first one I'm reading is STORY by Robert McKee. Here's my first thought on the book; I know you can't judge a book by it's cover, but can you judge one by its size?

I look at the others in my pile, and they seem a decent size. The Stein is 224 pages and the Maass is 250. Okay, so the King is 384, but he does have a tendency to go on for too long. The McKee is 455, excluding the index. 455 pages on how to write a story. That's a couple hundred more than the Stein and Maass books, and almost a hundred more than the King. If your book is longer than the one by the guy who wrote THE STAND, you maybe need to rethink that delete button. The shorter books feel right somehow. As if i can imagine a 250 page book on writing will help be to refresh or learn a few things and then go and apply them to my work. But a 455 word book is time spent away from the blank page.

One thing I notice very quickly in books is whether I think the writer is using too many words. I like to use as few as possible to tell a story (though my agent still finds a way to do it with fewer,) and generally if I feel the writer is overdoing the word count, I stop reading. McKee mentions many times that writers don't get to the point quickly enough, and yet the first 31 pages of his own book don't really need to be there. The same information could have been presented in around five pages of concise writing.

A great example of getting to the point comes in William Goldman's THE PRINCESS BRIDE. In presenting the 'good parts version,' Goldman is giving a running critique on self editing. Each of the scenes he laments cutting are scenes that added nothing to the story. I think a writer needs to be brutally honest with themselves, and if a page doesn't need to be there, then lose it.

I don't want to get sidetracked onto criticising STORY because I've not read all of it yet. There may well be something buried away in a later chapter that blows my mind, and McKee obviously knows more about craft than I do.

But every time I pick up the book and start reading, I feel it's size and weight, and can't help but wonder why I'm reading a book about how to write, when I could be spending that time writing. And it could be as simple as me making a snap judgement, because the Stein and the Maass are much shorter and I'm looking forward to reading those.

But I can't help but wonder about writing advice. This website has been up and running for almost a year, and you'll notice we rarely stray into giving out direct advice. Instead, we review things, we analyse, we discuss general topics and give opinions. Buried away in these posts you'll find tips and ideas that work for us, but that's not the same as giving out direct advice. I do give out advice to friends or via email to the fools....ummm...i mean.....folks who ask me for it. But on a blog like this, it wouldn't feel right. Part of that will be because my books aren't published yet, but I get the feeling that even once I get a deal, I'll still feel wrong to be giving out public advice.

A friend recently asked me for advice on how to get work finished. I write him an essay-length reply with various different tips on how to get his ass into the chair, and how to get work done every day. Just before hitting 'send,' though, I realised it was all irrelevant. The best advice I could give him was to not worry too much about my advice. I told him to find a couple of rules that worked for him and to stick to them. Ignore everything else.

I'm not saying there is no place for books on writing. I'm sure i will find some of the books in my pile very useful. But surely there comes a point when writing is like murder; the best way to learn is by doing it.

So how about you guys, what books have you read that have helped? Or do you avoid them? Do you come to sites like this looking for advice, or for random football and TV talk?

The Cold Kiss: The book that almost wasn't

This week marks the release of THE COLD KISS, a fantastic book from John Rector. He stopped by DSD HQ to talk about it.

By John Rector

This week, on July 6, The Cold Kiss will officially be released in the US and Canada.

For those of you who haven’t experienced it, seeing your first published novel on the shelves of your local bookstore is a surreal and wonderful experience. The stars have aligned in your favor, and the result is right in front of you. When it comes to the writing life, it’s the best feeling you can have. But in my case, that feeling comes with a long sigh of relief.

You see, I almost didn’t write the book.

Seventy pages into The Cold Kiss, I turned my back on it. I didn’t like the setting, too claustrophobic, the characters too dark, and the ending I had in mind seemed far too grim and depressing. I’d just spent several months being beaten up by NY publishers over the first book I’d written, The Grove, and I thought if I came at them with another dark, dread-filled novel, they’d send me packing yet again. So, I closed the file on The Cold Kiss, saved it in a dingy corner of my hard drive, and moved on.

If it hadn’t been for my wife reading a printed version of those first seventy pages and telling me she wanted to know the rest of the story, The Cold Kiss never would’ve seen the light of day.

As it turned out, she liked the claustrophobic setting and those dark, forgotten characters lost in all that snow. She convinced me to give it another try, so I picked it up again, and it didn’t take long to realize she was right.

There was something there.

I went back to work and finished the first draft of The Cold Kiss in sixteen weeks. Along the way, a new and much better ending presented itself, and for the first time I saw how all the pieces of the book would fall into place. That moment when everything comes together and you see your novel, complete and whole, for the very first time has always been my favorite part of being a writer.

At least until this week.

----------------------------------

All Nate and Sara want is a new life in a new town, away from the crime and poverty of their past. So, after being approached at a roadside diner by a man offering $500 for a ride to Omaha, they wonder if their luck might be changing.

At first it seems like easy money, but within a few hours the man is dead.

Now, forced off the road by a blizzard and trapped in a run-down motel on the side of a deserted highway, Nate and Sara begin to uncover the man's secrets. Who he was, how he died, and most importantly, why he was carrying two million dollars in his suitcase.

Before they know it, Nate and Sara are fighting for their lives, and in the end, each has to decide just how far they are willing to go to survive.

The Cold Kiss is an everyman psychological thriller that pits a young couple against moral corruption, greed, betrayal, and love. More simply, for two characters who may have used up all their chances, it's the classic final trip down the dark tunnel that might lead to heaven, but drags them through hell. This is A Simple Plan meets The Getaway, with a pulse-pounding plot and a twist ending. John Rector is name that all thriller fans will come to know and love for years to come.

For a solid review of THE COLD KISS, check out what Spinetingler thought here.

Order THE COLD KISS right here from the B&N people.

Independence Day

by: Joelle Charbonneau

Happy Independence Day to everyone in the USA!

Independence Day was always one of my favorite holidays as a kid. More than all the other holidays, I always got the sense that this was a day we celebrated as a community. The town got together for a parade, a huge festival at the golf course and, of course, fireworks when the sun went down. Our neighborhood backed the golf course where the fireworks were set off. Every 4th, we snuck through a hole in the fence, dodged the golf course rangers and watched the fireworks from the closest green possible. I should point out that our parents did this with us. In the finest tradition of our founding fathers, we were rebels.

Everyone always likes to talk about the founding fathers with a sense of reverence. As if they were blessed with a sense of what the future would hold when they put pen to paper and told King George to take his taxes and shove them where only a proctologist would find them. I’m paraphrasing just a tad here, but you get the point. These men had no sense of what the future would hold. I’m guessing that five of signers of the Declaration of Independence who were captured and tortured as traitors might not have been so keen to sign their name had they known what was coming. But sign they did. 56 men made a choice that had huge repercussions for them individually, for their families, their friends, their community and their country.

The best crime fiction (yeah – it’s a writing blog, so I had to circle back) is often created from those kind of choices. A character makes a choice they believe is right hoping they know what the outcome will be. Only they don’t. That choice sets into motion a series of events that they couldn’t have dreamed of leaving us on the edge of our seat while we take the ride with them. In the case of our founding fathers, their choices led to war. Some lost their homes. Some lost their families. Others lost their own lives. Their story contains all the elements from which great fiction is made. Only their story is true.

Happy 4th of July everyone! Be safe.