Basic Building Blocks for Mystery Writers

Jeff—Saturday

Oh what a three weeks it’s been. I’ve been back from Mykonos hiding out at my farm for the month of August. The place looks greener and lusher than I can ever remember, though my impression is largely based on what I can glean of it through the lone window in my third floor garret—where I sit fingers glued to the keyboard.

It’s been weeks of fifteen-hour days (a) finishing the latest draft of the new book, (b) reducing a full-length manuscript to a 750-word synopsis (i.e., think in terms of taking a chainsaw to key plot points, characters and scenes), and (c) going back to rewriting that same manuscript. ARRGHHHH.

But I shall return to Mykonos in ten days. AHHHH.

Hopefully that introduction summons up sufficient sympathy for my plight to justify my running a post I wrote several years ago for a different blogsite. It’s based on the mystery writing course I taught at Washington & Jefferson College for pour souls out there looking to get into this glamorous, wild, and carefree writing life.

So, here is my “brief but spectacular take” on the inherently controversial subject of mystery writing’s basic building blocks, with observations borrowed from true experts on the craft whose names I no longer remember.

I look forward to enduring the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune…along with the strong opinions of those of you who may disagree.  

 

As you no doubt will recall, Snow White had seven dwarfs helping her create her story.  I’m no Snow White, and I’ve only got six to rely upon, but to me they’re just as dependable, even if not as cuddly. Permit me to introduce you to Characters, Dialog, POV, Plot, Setting, and Tension.

1.         Characters drive the engine of your story.  They convey what you want the world to know. They are the product of your innermost thoughts, your views of life, but to really get to know them you must spend a lot of time earning their trust. It’s an investment well worth it, for your characters are who will make you famous.  Readers remember characters far after the plot has faded, e.g., Dirty Harry, Harry Potter, Hamlet, Pudgy Wombat.

As for where to find those characters, I’d say look into the very core of your being for their essence. I know, that sounds all artsy-fartsy, but think of your heart as a storehouse of emotions and subliminal impressions collected over a lifetime of encounters.  As for character traits and appearances, I tend to pick those up through direct observation of passersby and jotting down notes. Accept that you’re a body snatcher, storing up parts and gestures to flesh out the souls of those characters you’ve found lurking about in shadowy places within yourself…and enjoy.

2.         As to how we bring our characters to life, my favorite building block on that score is dialog. Good dialog is like eavesdropping.  Read your dialog aloud. Does it sound natural, does it fit into the setting, and most importantly, does your dialog bring your character to life consistent with your vision of that character’s unique voice?  To grasp what I mean, I recommend reading poetry and great plays, as you’ll gain an appreciation of how cadences and rhythms bring dialog to life.  For those of you adventuresome enough to attempt the most difficult of all dialog—dialects—I recommend you read Peter Matthiessen’s Far Tortuga.  Once you’ve made it through its first 50 pages you no longer need dialog tags, for he’s masterfully caught your ear with a unique dialect for each of his characters—including the narrator.

3.         With that mention of narrators, we arrive at POV, more formally known as Point of View. POV is what holds all the other building blocks together.  Indeed, how could any of us have made it through Moby-Dick without Ishmael telling us the story from his POV?  One should never underestimate the value of a likable narrator.

Most writers choose between first person and third person points of view.  First person is harder to pull off because the reader knows no more than does the protagonist, and that can lead to some awkward devices straining to get information before a reader that the protagonist could not otherwise be expected to possess. Third person POV allows for greater flexibility, but lacks the immediacy of first person telling. And of course, there are some notable POV shifting authors.  Ultimately, it’s your book, expressing your POV on POV. 

3.         Which brings us to Plot. Everyone struggles with plot.  Stephen King suggests tossing your characters into situational conflicts and letting them figure their own way out, advice consistent with the classic admonition that you should never try to fit your characters into your plot.  Once you have a basic story line in mind, let the plot evolve through your characters. 

Yes, I’ve drawn a difference between plot and story.

Story is a narrative based on time, a series of events flowing chronologically (The King died, and then the Queen died.).  Plot is a narrative based on what caused events to happen, a series of events deliberately arranged to create dramatic significance (The King died, and then the Queen died of grief.).

The same story can be told using different plots. Queen died because she too was murdered, or because she partied too hard celebrating the King’s death, or her horse threw her and kicked her to death on the way to the King’s funeral.

Plot is what makes your way of telling the story come to life, so make certain your plots are vivid and continuous, and don’t leave any loose ends hanging out there to frustrate the reader—unless you mean to.

5.         Setting is my personal favorite of the six elements, which makes sense since my books are named for places all across Greece.  Still, that’s not in any way inconsistent with my belief that characters are what drive a mystery.  I say that because, in my books, settings are characters.  For some, setting is of little concern beyond serving as a generic venue for telling the story, so a particular location doesn’t matter beyond being a city of a certain size, a farm, an ocean, a manor house, or a boxcar.

But no matter the level of importance you attach to the setting for your work, always bear in mind that nothing turns off a reader’s faith in an author more quickly than a story setting Chicago on the ocean—barring a tale set in post-apocalyptical climate change America.

6.         And now we’ve arrived at tension, the emotional roller coater ride element so beloved by readers of our genre. Tension heightens interest by relying upon the same basic three-step process used by comedians in telling a joke: setup, buildup, payoff.   One simple way of achieving tension is to reverse the polarity of a scene.  If a scene starts out positive for the protagonist, have it end on a negative note. That keeps your reader turning the pages, which after all, is our goal.

Here’s an example.  At the beginning of the scene it’s dusk, and we find our hero racing his super-charged police cruiser across an empty, two-lane, West Texas badland blacktop highway headed for the kidnappers’ hideout; a place he’s discovered through two days of knuckle-busting, call-in-every-favor, no-time-for-sleep police work.  Our hero’s thoughts are focused on how he’s going to rescue poor Nell without any back-up, and we, his readership, have no doubt he’s going to do it.  At least not until three mule deer dart out of the brush directly in front of him doing nowhere near his cruiser’s 90 MPH.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, my garret calls.

—Jeff

Home Beckons

Jeff—Saturday

I am so jealous this week of my blogmates. Their posts show them travelling off to Florence (not Kentucky), Paris (not Texas), Hong Kong (via the land of King Kong), and hobbiting in Scotland (are there one or two “t”s in hobbiting?), while I sit in Washington (neither the DC nor the state versions thereof) down in the heart of southwest Pennsylvania’s natural gas fracking territory close by its border with West Virginia. 

That's me, in the lower left corner.

It is home to a gem of a picture postcard college where I once again have the privilege of playing professor for a month to a dozen mystery-writing students.  But it’s also proving to be an endless source of Stephen King-like inspirational moments—both in characters and settings.  

In juxtaposition to my current locale are photos and videos contained in the daily missives (I consider them more like missiles for their destructive effect upon my psyche) from my Mykonos friends enticing me to return home to the off-season beauty of our island.  How can one not miss such a beautiful place; filled with people who live by the philosophy of, when all about you is crumbling, don’t mope, get out and enjoy life for what you have.  Viva the Mediterranean attitude!

But nothing touched me more than this brief British Pathé film clip of Mykonos 50 years ago. It is of a time long passed…unless you happen to be on Mykonos during the off season.

Perhaps it is time to go home.

Rhenia, Delos, Mykonos (Left to right)

Soon.

 —Jeff

If You're One of My Students, Don't You Dare Read This.

Okay. Now that I have your attention, class, please don’t forget that the first 250 words of your new mystery novel are due Monday…and that additional 250-word submissions are due every day before class for the next two weeks.

Yep, I’m a teacher. Even have the faculty ID to prove it.  Students are calling me “Professor” (a title quite different from what my own professors used to call me) and some even call me “doctor.”  Though technically I am a doctor, in these lurching Affordable Care Act times I worry that if people overhear me addressed by that title they’ll expect I can somehow shed light on what all of it means.  I’d have a better chance impersonating George Carlin explaining the meaning of life to Cheech & Chong than tackling ACA.  And neither would be a pretty sight.

Speaking of pretty sights, take a look at the building where I hold classes: The Burnett Center at Washington & Jefferson College in Washington, Pennsylvania, thirty miles south of Pittsburgh. 

Here’s the view looking out the front door of Burnett up the hill toward the President’s house.

I actually attended this college more years back than I care to (but still can) remember.  In the quirkiest of coincidences the college put me up in a dorm apartment that just happens to be three doors down the hall from the room I lived in as a freshman. And before any of you wags ask, NO, there weren’t hitching posts outside the dorm for horses in those days.  But I did stand on that corner (in the photograph below) one morning in early 1963 and watch President JFK go by in a motorcade.  So close you could almost touch him….

Back to the present.  Teaching is an interesting experience, unlike any professional obligation I’ve undertaken before. As a lawyer, my duty was to park my predilections at the door and to act ruthlessly (within the law) on behalf of my clients. As a writer, my only duty is to write what I like, hoping all the while that my readers will agree with my choices. 

As a teacher, I see my duty as a product of the two: I am responsible to those looking to me for guidance to pass on those aspects of my own experiences I believe will benefit them in developing a frame of reference for their own unique writing lives.  I can’t build it for them, but I can suggest where to look for parts.

What I’m being asked to do requires a lot of work, considerable thinking, and adjustments on the fly.  Then again, what positive achievements in life do not?

I know, I’m beginning to sound a bit pedagogical.  Hard not to when you’re a novice, especially when you’re lucky enough to have your first gig on a small liberal arts college campus with as idyllic a setting as any Hollywood created vision. And not just the buildings, though at least one stone and white column gem goes back to the late 18^th Century and my own office sits on the second floor of a white brick and column classic that’s hard to imagine as ever having been anything but home to a college English Department.

For beyond the physical beauty of the campus and the Norman Rockwell reminiscences summoned up by the adjacent town streets, you have the people.  First day on campus I was invited to a faculty New Year’s Day get-together.  In the absolutely best connotation of the phrase “straight out of central casting,” you couldn’t have put together a more representative sample of the best of what it means to be part of the academic life, with interesting, giving, helpful, knowledgeable folk all welcoming me into their community.

No, I’m not sucking up for a better grade.  I’m just telling it like it is.  And I already have invitations to dinner.  Though I could use a few more....

I just hope that my sixteen dedicated students in ENG 283-01 (MYSTERY WRITING UNMASKED: Techniques, Tactics, and Trends) will have had as much fun as I’m having––and manage to learn something along the way.

Jeff—Saturday