Writing As My Own Astral Projection Device

Write what you know?  Is that the belief other crime writers go by? Most of us will never commit a crime worthy of a police investigation. We’ll never encounter a career criminal.

Although I’ve never been in a fist fight I can write a convincing street fight scene. I can also write a pursuit down a dark alley at midnight, because I have an imagination. We all have an imagination

Like an ability to sketch a landscape in front of us, some of us can do it better than others. Writing a fight scene requires not only imagination but the craft of animating characters into real people and giving them the reasons to bruise their knuckles.

I’ve never been shot, and never seen an actual gunshot wound. But how many times have we witnessed violence and death on TV and in the movies? Remember when Tony Soprano got shot in the stomach?  We all remember that.

I can imagine a fist coming at me. In my imagination I know the smell of gun powder, the sound, and can feel the kick of a gun.

I found this in the New York Times, Book Section:  Write What You Know’ — Helpful Advice or Idle Cliché? http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/30/books/review/write-what-you-know-helpful-advice-or-idle-cliche.html?ref=books 

I’m quoting Moshe Hamid from this article. He writes:

But I also write about things I haven’t experienced. I’ve written from the point of view of a woman, of a global surveillance system, of a writer who is being beheaded. I write these things because I want to transcend my experiences. I want to go beyond myself. Writing isn’t just my mirror, it’s my astral projection device.

All crime writers have catapulted ourselves into worlds we will never know. I’ve written from the point of view of a Chechen gold digger, a homeless teenager, a Kurdish gangster. It all feels normal to me while I’m doing it. 

A well-practiced astral projection device is internet research. What would a storyteller do nowadays without Google where you can research your idea in ever-widening circles? I’m researching blue grass mandolin right now, as though people who are reading my books are breathless with anticipation to learn about what I’ve found. I’m unlikely to use a twentieth of what I unearth.

When are you simply procrastinating the writing by contacting yet one more expert? Reading one more website?  Listening to one more mandolin riff? After all, playing the mandolin is not what the story is about.

I love research. I made my living working on a series of academic research projects. It got a little stuffy and tedious after a couple of decades. That's where I learned how to launch into an unfamiliar topic and serve it up in digestible and enjoyable hunks. Readers have asked me how many times I’ve been to Chechnya and Turkey to write Rip-Off and On Behalf of the Family. Actually, never. But my books take you there.

Visit my website at http://marpreston.comfor a free introduction into my world as a mystery writer.

A Reader’s Attention Span

How long do you give a new book to hook you? Readers of contemporary fiction don’t have the attention span and discretionary time that readers had in the 1900s. Or even a decade ago. Now, readers will skim until they get to the point where something interesting happens. Or they put down the book and never finish it.

If your fiction–short story, personal essay, or novel—doesn’t connect, the editor or agent will never get to the good part where the story really takes off. It may be there in chapter two, around page 20, but if there’s a typo, or a dream sequence, a flashback, your piece is flipped face down on a towering pile of rejects.

Sometimes there’s a typo on page one. A misspelled word. A cliché that’s so old and hoary the agent—or reader—groans. Something like:  “Little did I know that today would be the day I would meet _____ and my life would change forever.” These are strong indicators that bad writing, more cliches and typos are piled high in the pages ahead.

Today we start the story when something happens to tip the protagonist—the teller of the story—into a world of trouble. He’s been sailing along in the world of finance, say, or kick boxing or Tenth Grade when something happens.  Something big that’s going to knock him flying. This captures the reader’s attention.

The protagonist is presented with a problem that will carry him to the finish of the story, where to some extent he has solved the problem, done something that he couldn’t do in the first pages, grown and changed along the way.

New writers think they have to work in the back story, fill in what’s been happening to the central character or characters or readers for the last five years. They worry that readers will be left not knowing what’s going on. I’m of the opinion that readers are at least as smart as I am. What went before can be implied, or filled in later in the story.

But if I open with my character rambling around in his head about Wall Street or the Indochinese family of kickboxing sports, I’m losing readers who couldn’t care less.  They want to see something happen.

They don’t have to know how my protagonist—the detective in my case—got his first job as a stockbroker, or became a kick boxing champion. If I throw a likable character into the fire in the first few pages, they’ll keep reading. We fill in ourselves. What would I do if I discovered a major fraud by my trusted employer friend? How would I enter the cage if I knew my opponent had all but killed the last guy who went up against him?

That’s part of the joy of picking up a new book. What would I do? Would I catch the clue the murderer left? Would you? After all the research you've done, do you think you could run a crime scene?

Check out for yourself how long you give a new book to hook you. Check out my first three Santa Monica crime novels in a boxed set. 

Have I followed my own advice?

 
https://www.amazon.com/Detective-Dave-Mason-mystery-Department-ebook/dp/B0118B8G6O/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1465660172&sr=8-7&keywords=mar+preston

The Freedom of Finishing by Mar Preston

I’ve just sent off my sixth novel to my editor and my two best and trusted writer friends. I am hoping to get insightful comments that help me better this mystery. It is the second in my series about a Kern County Sheriff’s Detective investigating a murder in the far from tranquil village where I live.

I’ve turned it over after two years work on it. After four unpublishable novels which served as an apprenticeship in learning how to write, then five modestly successful crime fiction novels, I thought I had the process down fairly well. This last one has almost defeated me.

Perhaps it was one I did really want to write but felt I had to. Four previous novels were set in Santa Monica and featured an SMPD detective. But my bestselling novel had been a standalone set in my mountain village. I thought it should be the debut of a series.

It’s advanced slowly through many fits and starts. I tried outlining which is against my nature. I changed the killer half way through. I gave the killer a sidekick. The only constant through this agonizing process was that the story took place in a cat sanctuary. I knew the animal rescue world and it unfailingly intrigues me.

In the meantime I wrote and published 3 eBooks on the topic of Writing Your First Mystery. The book, still untitled, just wouldn’t come and I had now put so much time into it, I couldn’t abandon it. Finally I summarized the process in a 4th eBook called Finishing Your First Mystery, now in the process of publication. I worked at the wretched novel almost every day for two years. Of course there were lapses, but not many.

Quoting one of my favorite writers, Neil Gaiman: Creative work is often a slog and the only way you'll really get good at it is to finish what you start even when it's not going well. You'll end up learning more from that experience than if you quit.

Gaiman is right. I feel some sense of satisfaction, it’s true, even if I can’t say yet it’s ready for publication. By now I know it will be finished and I will feel pride when I hold it in my hand.
More than anything I feel the freedom of finishing. My first waking thought is not dread at what lays ahead of me when I open the file for the day. I can play at writing. Blogs, do some long-needed promotion, write a catch up email to my friend in Australia, pick up the phone and have a long gossipy conversation with a friend, start a new novel.

I’ve learned again that writing a novel-length piece of crime fiction is a marathon endeavor. My good friend tells me I always say I will never do this again at the finish of a novel. I don’t remember that but I believe her.

A story is already bubbling in my mind, this one in Santa Monica.

Writing Your First Mystery is available free here on my website.

Writing the End - Mar Preston

Finishing: this subject is much with me as I labor towards the end of my sixth murder mystery, this one set in a tranquil village in the mountains of Central California.  A sequel to Payback, the debut of a second series that takes place in a village somewhat like where I live, it hasn’t come easily.  In fact it’s the most difficult of my six crime fiction novels. 

My editor returned my first draft with comments. I knew the draft had faults but I couldn’t figure out how to fix them. If I was ever going to write The End I needed to get past the gaping plot holes and somewhat peculiar motivations for the Killer. 

She pounced on all the faults, of course, because she’s a superb editor. We had a phone meeting and I did my best not to whimper. I know that critique is not criticism.  What lies ahead to fix the problems is a painstaking restructuring of the characters and plot.

What is keeping me going at this point? Certainly not the money.  I hear you all laughing. 

The fame?  I am famous on my block. They love me here. Not the fame then. 

The joy of writing?  Not hardly. I actually considered falling madly, foolishly in love with an unsuitable man just so I would have the excuse not to finish this wretched thing. 

But something must keep me going. I like my characters. That must be it. The setting, yes, that too. The novel features a murder in a well-funded cattery, that’s a sanctuary for cats of all sorts: kittens that get adopted the same day they come in; cats who are frisky and cute; and senior cats who have beautiful markings.  And it provides shelter for the sickly and  unadoptables. 

I have in mind Cat House on the Kings near Fresno, California, which I visited this summer when I got my American citizenship. I could not speak more highly of the work they do. That visit was a joy.

I do care about the subject matter of animal rescue. There are things I want to say. 

Writing a book is a marathon exercise. It will drain from you every scrap of inborn talent, memories, dreams, fantasies and life experience. You may have come to the point where there’s nothing left but heart. Raw guts. 

I suspect I’m at the 23- mile mark and can’t see the finish. That’s what I say to myself as I sit down every day to work on it. I will finish this and it will be good. 

 http://www.amazon.com/Private-School-Detective-Mason-Mystery-ebook/dp/B010YF49XO/

Gee, That’s A Lot Of Typing

I don’t talk to my friends a lot about my writing life.  When I have a new book coming out, they’ll ask what it’s about and some even read it and tell me they like the book. But in the year or so between books, the life of a mystery writer isn’t that exciting.

One of my close friends asked me about how the new book was going, not something I get asked all that often because I do a lot of other things like animal rescue and good cause volunteering and that’s more exciting to talk about.

I was prepared to rattle on about my progress on a new book set in the village where I live, but her interest was short-lived.  I told her I had about 75 pages so far.

“Gee, that’s a lot of typing.” Her comment stopped me short.

Well, yes, it is a lot of typing.  I didn’t say that I would rewrite, and revise those pages three or four times before I sent it off to my editor. Perhaps it’s even more. You don’t just type a book.

I guess the excitement of the writing life happens between your own ears. I love that moment when you type the first sentence that comes to mind just to move the plot along. Suddenly the psyche provides a twist on a familiar phrase that makes your heart sing.

However, the magic only occurs when your fingers are holding the pen or dancing on the keyboard. You can’t think a book down on paper. You have to type it.

The excitement, it seems, can’t be shared. 

What do you share about the daily business of your writing life?

 

http://www.amazon.com/ ebook/dp/B00I82BFVK/