How to rite Killer Fiction (23 page)

Have a look at Lawrence Block's novel
The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams.
Stolen baseball cards, valuable ones, are at the center of the story. It seems that everyone Bernie Rhodenbarr comes in contact with knows about these cards, even though there is no apparent reason they should know. What appears to be the kind of coincidence writing teachers warn you about turns out to be no coincidence when Block later reveals the connections among these seemingly unrelated characters.

Hidden connections between seemingly unrelated people and things conserve your favorite characters and clues by integrating them fully into the story. They're no longer irrelevant wanderings away from the main point; they take us right back to that point, even if they get there by a circular path. That wonderfully quirky old antique dealer you can't bear to leave on the cutting-room floor can stay in the story if he turns out to be the grandfather of the client's girlfriend. It won't be a coincidence if the girlfriend suggested him as the expert the P.I. ought to see about those stolen Ming vases.

The Outliner's Process_

There's an upside and a downside to both processes. If you're an Outliner, you can spend a huge amount of time making ready to write without actually writing. Some outliners make themselves crazy with pre-planning. Every character has a history, every location is detailed with precision, whether it matters to the story or not. Research eats up an enormous amount of time for some Outliners, who may compound their mistake by trying to cram as much of it into their books as possible.

If preparation enhances the final product, it's time well spent; if it doesn't, it's vamping.

Vamping till ready: the piano player knocks out a jaunty little tune while he's waiting for the performer to step onto the stage. If the performer's a little late, the piano player repeats the vamp. He keeps on repeating it until it's time to go into the actual number. If he vamps for too long a time, the audience begins to clamor for the performer. The same is true of outlining—at some point you must begin the actual prose. You must write
chapter one
on a piece of paper and spill some lifeblood on the page just like every other writer on the planet.

The Outliner needs to be aware that the tendency to want everything to be perfect before
chapter one
hits the page is a fantasy. No matter how hard he works to get everything in place, chapter one is a draft. It will change. There is no such thing as perfect. There comes a time when the Outliner has to let go of the preparation mode and get into writing mode. He's got to stop vamping and start writing.

The Changing Vision

The first step is to realize that while a writer begins a book with a vision, that vision is bound to change as the book takes shape. The Outliner thinks she sees the book as a whole, sitting like a pot of gold at the end of the writing rainbow. The operative words here are "she thinks." In truth, the Outliner can't see the finished book as clearly as she believes she does; there will be changes she can't imagine at the beginning, and if she's writing a living novel instead of a classroom exercise, she'd better let them happen.

Novels are big. They take a long time to write. And in the course of that writing, things change. Pieces of the Outliner's vision stubbornly refuse to fall into place; what seemed inevitable now seems contrived and must be rethought. You look back at chapter one from the vantage point of chapter seven and long to rip it up and start over.

What's going on?

The vision changes. The vision grows and alters as the writer works herself deeper into the story. The best writers let this happen. They open themselves to a new vision; they permit the book to grow and shape itself according to an altered perception.

The Outliner's Toolbox

The process of pre-planning can occur in a number of ways. Rick Boyer, who won an Edgar award for
Billingsgate Shoal,
gets one of those marbled hardcover essay notebooks and fills it with a scenario of the story. His scenario may include maps and drawings, and sums up the entire action. He handwrites it, although he uses a word processor when it comes to the actual prose. It's one way of gaining overview, of managing the tremendous amount of information a writer needs to carry in his head in order to write an entire novel.

Margaret Maron, on the other hand, fills folders with material for each chapter; when it comes time to write, say, chapter three, she'll have notes and pictures cut from magazines and articles about the topic and anecdotes she heard from a local wise woman. That folder is a kind of outline, even though it is used to stimulate the filling of a blank page.

Maron has also created a detailed family tree for her main character, Judge Deborah Knott (who has ten brothers, so it's quite a tree), as well as a map of her fictional Colleton County, North Carolina. Particularly if you're developing a series, having visual aids to help you keep things consistent will pay off in the long run.

Some really experienced writers—Lawrence Block and Robert B. Parker come to mind—do it all in their heads. Block "blocks out" his story (okay, take me out and shoot me) and when he has it fairly well set in his mind, he checks into a motel, plugs in his laptop, and bangs the script out in a week or two. The speed of his writing is made possible by the months of thinking work he did before the check-in.

While it's hard to call that outlining, it is a way of pre-planning what's going to he written down. It is not the free-floating style of the true

Blank-pager; the in-the-head writer is culling and editing as he goes, tossing out what doesn't work before it has the chance to clutter up the disk or the page.

The essence of outlining is throwing away. The Blank-pager spills all her ideas onto a page and culls later; the Outliner narrows the focus, consolidates characters, drops subplots before committing himself to prose.

What do you do with the stuff that's left over? Some writers make a file of out-takes, material that isn't useful for this book but might be recycled into the next novel or into a short story. The truth is that most of the stuff that hits the cutting-room floor never gets recycled, but that's not what's important; what's important is that it doesn't go into
this
book. A writer in the contractive stage has to be willing to let go of anything that isn't moving the central storyline.

One of the benefits of outlining is that the culling process happens before the writer has committed himself to actual prose. It's a lot easier to lay aside a few index cards than to excise whole scenes involving a character you no longer want in the story.

Opening Up the Story

Sometimes a writer must move from a contraction phase back into expansion. This can happen to an Outliner whose preplanned scenes don't work on the page the way he hoped they would while in outline form.

I had a clue once, a really brilliant and wonderful clue given to me by my local Brooklyn pizza parlor. They made specialty pizzas, and one of my favorites was rosemary chicken. Long spikes of rosemary on top of white-meat chicken spread out on a crisp pizza crust—tasty and unusual. So I decided the victim in my book would have eaten that pizza before she died; it would be in her stomach, and would point to the fact that she'd eaten at a certain pizza parlor that served this unusual dish. I used to go and eat "clue pizza" and enjoy it even more knowing how I was going to use it in my book.

The trouble was that when I went to write the scene, I realized that the victim had no reason to go to this particular pizza parlor, which was nowhere near the scene of her death, except to eat this pizza and give my detective a clue. What had looked so terrific in outline had become contrived and illogical in the context
of the story.

If you read the finished book (
Fresh Kills),
you will find no reference to rosemary chicken pizza. I still mourn my pizza clue, but the good of the book as a whole demanded that I deviate from the outline and open up to a new way of finding Amber's killer.

I had to move from the contraction phase of writing according to the outline, and go back into expansion in order to find new clues to replace my lost pizza clue. I had to brainstorm, to cast my net wide, to open myself up to a new set of what-ifs in order to solve a problem I thought I had already solved.

Outliners can also move back into expansion by means of freewriting. This is writing without a plan, writing off the record. I've done it for different reasons at different stages of the writing process. Once I freewrote a scene between a father and daughter on the daughter's tenth birthday. This scene wasn't in the book because the daughter was fourteen when the action of the novel took place, but by letting myself see a glimpse of the father-daughter relationship at an earlier stage, I added depth to the portraits that did end up between the covers of the book. I've also written my way into certain characters by freewriting about them in their own voices, even though they will only be seen in the finished book through the eyes of my first-person main character. Both methods involve a foray into expansion during the contractive phase of writing-to-outline.

Do the Opposite

Does this sound like I'm telling you to do the opposite of what you've been doing?

If so, you're getting the point. When you find yourself blocked, what you've been doing is taking you down a path that leads to frustration, so trying the opposite ought to end the frustration. The trouble is, it also makes you nervous because it's alien to your instinctive nature as a writer.

The Outliner hates giving up that tightly knit structure, yet opening up and adding a new character, a new subplot, another clue package, is just what the book needs. Micromanaging your characters even more than you already have leads to dry, dull characters without a spontaneous thought in their heads.

Trust is the key here. Trust in yourself and trust in your overriding vision. Trust that you won't be losing golden words and startling plot developments; you'll be gaining richer characters and even better twists and turns. Trust that there's more where the old stuff came from, that you have the talent and depth to take your material to the max and you don't have to settle lor something your heart tells you isn't working.

The Blank-Pager's Toolbox_

Suspense writers are more likely than mystery people to be Blank-pagers. The suspense writer likes writing her character into a corner and then extricating her by sheer wit. For a wonderful example of how this process works, try reading Stephen King's
Misery,
in which a writer is forced to create his story by the blank-page method. Blank-pagers are wonderful at starting books, at creating gripping situations that bring the reader into the story.

The crunch comes when the story has to go somewhere. Blank-pagers often come into my classes complaining that they've written one hundred pages of a novel and stopped because they had no central plotline. Great scenes, but no payoff. Several threads of story that never wove themselves into a coherent whole. The downside of spontaneity is that a novel needs a spine, and the Blank-pager may not understand how to give it one.

How can Blank-pagers pull their stories together without losing the spark of spontaneity?

Blank-pagers go through a contraction process, too. Some don't do it until they've finished an entire first draft. They want to work their way through the story step by step, then set the manuscript aside for a bit and go back in with a hacksaw. They can't decide what to leave out and what to emphasize in chapter one until they've seen how the final chapter plays out.

But some Blank-pagers don't want to wait until the end. They are the ones who come into class with ten chapters of a book that, when looked at correctly, will emerge as three or four stories piled on top of one another. There's the storyline about the stolen diamond necklace; there's the mysterious package delivered to the house; there's Harry and his mistress meeting for the last time at a seedy bar near the bus station; there's a man at the bus station asking for directions and saying something about "paying back Melanie." How does it all hang together? And who is that man at the bus station?

The first thing the Blank-pager in this situation must do is stop writing. The natural tendency of the Blank-pager is to solve all writing problems by scaring up a new storyline; all this does is add another wing to an already sprawling house. (If you've ever been to the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, you'll see the architectural equivalent of this process. Sarah Winchester, widow of the inventor of the Winchester rifle, was told she'd die when she finished building her house, so—she never finished! She built stairways to nowhere, rooms too tiny to stand up in, and innumerable windows peering into blank walls. Not a house you'd want to live in—and not a book you'd want to read.)

The second thing the writer must do is reread what she already has and ask herself which of her storylines excites her the most. Is it the diamond necklace? Is it the relationship between Melanie, the mistress, and her mother? Is it that scene where Betty broke down in tears as she confessed that she'd known about Harry's mistress for years but never said anything?

One of the storylines is going to be more interesting to you than the others. Maybe it's the last one to enter the mix
^-
, maybe it's the one that's gotten the most ink. Whatever the reason for choosing one, the important thing is to decide which storyline will dominate the book.