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