The Story Behind the Story: Hitting the Wall

by Sandra Parshall

Second in a series of occasional posts about writing Book 6.

I know it will happen every time, I know the point at which it will happen, yet I always feel blindsided when I hit that first wall in the first draft of a new book.

While I do as much preparation as I can before I begin a novel, I’m not a writer who can produce a detailed outline and stick to it meticulously all the way to the end. I decide what the story is. I collect the most important characters (knowing others will show up as I go along). I know the identity of the villain(s) and the motive for the murder(s). I know where I’m going without being sure of every step along the way.

When I have a first scene in mind, I start writing.

You may sneer at “the mystery formula” if you like, but I’m comfortable with beginning each book in a roughly similar way, counting on circumstances and characters to make it fresh every time. The dramatic inciting event – a murder or the discovery of a body – comes in the first chapter. This is what I look for when reading crime fiction too. I want to know quickly what the story is going to be about. By chapter two, we begin to understand who is affected by the crime. From  chapter three through the middle of the book, the story opens up, it expands to include subplots and unexpected threads.

And that’s where I always hit a wall.

I question the premise itself: Can I really make a good story out of this material? Do I have enough material here for the kind of complex story I enjoy telling? I doubt my ability to pull it off. (That doubt will linger until the book is finished.)

Once those doubts set in, it’s awfully easy to let them expand into overwhelming angst. Does it matter whether I write this book? Who will care if I don’t finish it? I consider destroying my computer. And so on. When I find myself at the edge of a sheer drop into a black chasm, it’s time to pull back, refocus, and move on.

That's where I am right now.

I will do more outlining. The middle of a crime novel should be bursting with suddenly exposed secrets, rivalries, and unsuspected relationships. But before I can write all that, I need to give the characters more thought. The hidden story – what really happened – matters most, because it drives the actions of the characters. If I don’t thoroughly understand the hidden story, I’ll get to the end of the book and have trouble justifying what the characters have been doing for the last 300 pages.

Eventually, I’ll regain my confidence and plow back into the writing. I don’t worry about writing well at this stage. I’m not concerned with pace or continuity. I don’t include much description. I don’t go into a lot of detail about anything – except what the characters are saying. I let them talk as much as they want to, and if they’re new to me and I’m not sure who and what they are, they will reveal themselves and their lives in their own words. I can shape the dialog in the next draft.

Many writers say they love the first draft and hate rewriting, but I’m the opposite. The first draft is torture for me. But I have to produce that big, messy lump of story before I feel safe, before I can breathe a sigh of relief and think, Yes, I’m going to make a book out of this.

Rewriting – shaping the story, finding the right pace, filling out the characters – is what I love. Rewriting is the prize at the end of the first draft, the goal line I’m running toward. It looks a long way off right now, but I know I’ll get there if I keep coming to the computer every day and letting my characters talk.

What Works

by Sheila Connolly

This past weekend I read a book by an author I know and admire.  It wasn’t a recent book, but rather one that crawled out of my endless To-Be-Read pile (I'm trying to sort through my books, and papers, and supplies, and…).  I don't recall when or where I got it.  

I like this writer.  I've read a number of her earlier books and enjoyed them.  Actually, I enjoyed this book too, but kind of in spite of myself.

On the plus side:  she has a great voice—sharp and funny.  She's honest about the fact that her male characters (mostly macho military types) tend to think from, uh, below the belt—and they acknowledge it, although that doesn't stop them.  She's great at portraying romantic confusion, and almost all her lovers are definitely starcrossed (and communication-challenged).

So why am I complaining?  Here's why:

Too many characters.  In the writer's defense, I will say that she writes a kind of multi-character series that focuses on only a few characters (and usually pairs) in each book.  So in theory we know almost all of them each time we dip into the latest book.  But in this case…I flat out lost count.  I believe there are at least ten major characters, equally split between the genders, and they all end up paired off by the end, if they weren't already.  Or weren't in an earlier book before some of that miscommunication happened and one or the other stormed off in a confused huff, usually to some dangerous foreign assignment where people shoot at them.

But even recognizing a few of the names here didn't help.  I simply couldn't keep them all straight, and worse, the chapters bounced around from one to another willy nilly.  Two names even started with the same first letter (not fair!).  Look, I liked all the characters, and found them convincing, or at least entertaining—but not all at once, in the same book. (I did have to wonder how the heck the author kept everybody straight when she was writing this—she must have had a massive whiteboard or a whole lot of sticky notes.)

Where's the plot? As I said, I really like this writer's voice, so I didn't mind letting things unwind at the author's pace.  It's not a short book (477 pages in hardcover), so there was no hurry to get the story rolling.  But…by the time I reached p. 122 and still had no idea what the plot was going to be, I began to worry.  Maybe if I were to go back with a microscope, I might find a few hints of what was to come, but my general response was, when's this thing going to start?  I'll concede that the author did pull it all together by the end, but she took her own sweet time about it (I guess if you're a New York Times bestseller, you can get away with that).

Why do I care?  Well, I'm a writer and I want to know what makes a book work.  I've read—or more accurately, started—quite a few books that I dropped after a few chapters, saying, this really isn't working for me.  Sometimes I can say why, like the characters are simply not believable, or the language is clunky and dull.  But sometimes I can't put a finger on what I don't like—I simply know that I don't.  And life is too short to read books you don't like.

I've also read books that I loved, where the plot looked like Swiss cheese but I really didn't care because I was so caught up in the flow of the author's words, or the excitement of the story, that I just kept plunging right along.  It's a guilty pleasure—but I don't have to critique everything I read, do I? Can't I just enjoy, now and then?

That's why this particular book was such an anomaly for me. I finished it. In fact, I spent a lot of this past weekend reading this book (because it was cooler than doing anything else, like moving).  I did finally get caught up in it, somewhere in the middle.  But what it proved is that the characters and the voice trumped the pacing and the plot for me, as a reader.  I'm not sure how to use it myself.  Note to self:  make sure your characters are appealing and well-drawn.  And throwing in some sex doesn't hurt either.

What draws you into a book and keeps you reading?  Character, plot, style, or some combination of all of those that just clicks for you?

How Many Is Too Many?

by Sheila Connolly

Recently I read, back to back, two books that incorporated multiple characters.  I don't mean a handful, but literally dozens of people, who played varying roles in the story.  I thought in one case it worked well; in the other, not so much.  And I've been trying to figure out why.

These are both cozies, by writers who have written other books in the same series.  I've read the other books, and I know and like both authors.  I'm not going to name names, because I'm not promoting or slamming either author.  I just want to come to terms in my own mind why one treatment was more successful than the other.



Cozies by definition take place within a closed community, which means that the villain can't be a stranger who wanders into town and commits a crime, unless that stranger is one of the existing character's Uncle Fred or Aunt Tillie, come back after plastic surgery to reclaim the stolen inheritance.  The rules say there has to be a connection to the town, however obscure, because how else can the protagonist talk to people in town and gather clues? 


What size is a small town?  Two hundred people?  Two thousand?  And how many of those people does the protagonist know by name, or know well enough to call by his or her first name?  I haven't done any scientific analysis, but I'd guess the pool may be, oh, twenty people?  And generally, in a series, these people are introduced gradually, a few per book, and they'll return in future books in the series so the reader can get to know them and remember them.  If you the writer are lucky, your readers will contact you and ask, "when will we see So-and-So again?"  Which tells you that you've created a memorable and likeable character.

So what went right and wrong in the two books I mentioned?  That's what I'm puzzling over. 

--Was the cast of dozens organic and relevant to the plot (i.e., did those people have a reason to be there)?  Yes, in both cases.  In one, it was an unusual situation, but logical; in the other, it was small-town business as usual. 

--Did the characters have enough "face time" for us to get to know them?  Not so clear.  I don't know if there's a standard for word count to establish personality, but in one book the characters distinguished themselves quickly--their own identities, and their relationships to each other. In the other book, there were a lot of people who popped up now and then, and usually the first time they were accompanied by a tag-line explaining them ("Suzie, my former best friend from high school, who had been going through a rough patch with her third husband and was currently living off handouts from her redneck relatives").  The latter smacks of the dreaded "telling, not showing."

I'll be the first to admit that it's not easy to throw in a new character without adding an explanation.  It's a challenge to give them a real personality with only a few lines of dialogue and some brief indications of body language.  Sure, you can use some description occasionally, but if you add it to each new character, it quickly becomes repetitive and throws you right out of the story.

Back in the golden age (whenever that was), mysteries, particularly British ones, used to include casts of characters right up front, along with maps of the small town and diagrams of the manor house where all the action takes place.  The character list was often quite detailed:  "Sophronia Everlast, the maiden aunt of Hector Pumphrey, lord of the manor;" or "Tilly, the second chambermaid for the South Wing."  It seems quaint now, but if you were reading the book intermittently and managed to forget who was who, it was nice to have a reference handy.

I don't think readers' attention span has improved.  Nowadays we're used to quick snapshots of information, and we're often doing two or three things at once.  We're not necessarily as able to focus and concentrate on a book, much less keep track of who's who.

Does that mean we the writers have to dumb down our stories?  Limit the number of cast members?  I hope not.  But we do have to be careful not to overload the cast.  Okay, the shopkeeper down the street is a lovely person, but couldn't that important clue be delivered by someone else we've already met? 

I'd hate to reduce writing in any genre to a formula, but how many characters in a book is too many?

Characters We Love

Elizabeth Zelvin

I woke up this morning thinking about Brat Farrar: not just Josephine Tey’s 1949 mystery, but Brat himself, the horse-loving orphan who agrees to impersonate a lost heir and finds his “belonging-place.” Yep, I remember the dialogue as well as the characters, decades after I last reread the book. If that’s not a measure of the novelist’s art, I don’t know what is.

Nowadays we hear a lot about “crime fiction,” sometimes accompanied by a dismissal of the traditional mystery. For me, character is the heart of a good book, and my favorite traditional mysteries have it. No matter how long it’s been since I visited them, I’m not going to confuse Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane with anybody else or forget the important events in their lives. The same goes for Judge Deborah Knott, Sharon McCone, Mary Russell, Kate Shugak, Anna Pigeon, and Skip Langdon. All of these characters go through a process of growth and change in the course of a series arc.

One of my newer favorite authors is Charlaine Harris, not because her deft mixing of subgenres started a trend but because each of her protagonists is distinct and memorable. Lily Bard’s the one who survived a horrific abduction and rape, learned martial arts, cleans houses, and roams the streets at night. Sookie Stackhouse is the telepathic barmaid who dates vampires. Harper Connelly got struck by lightning at fifteen and now finds dead people, arousing suspicion and challenging disbelief with her knowledge of how they died. Nor are these details simply backstory stuck onto a generic protagonist figure. All these women have depth and complexity. All are endearing. After reading about them, I’m always eager to come back for more.

My favorite characters in other genres share this ability to leap off the page and into the reader’s heart: Jamie and Claire Fraser, Miles Vorkosigan and Ekaterin, Francis Crawford of Lymond and Philippa. To me these are real people, whether they live in the past or in the future. In a weird way it doesn’t matter that they exist only on the page. Great characters forge a bond between the author’s imagination and the reader’s and create a small miracle every time we open a book.

Now I’ve got a book and characters of my own. I would be thrilled if they find their way into readers’ hearts like those I’ve mentioned. A few people are starting to talk about my protagonist Bruce and his sidekicks Barbara and Jimmy as if they’re real, as if they have a past and a future outside the covers of Death Will Get You Sober. In fact, I know they do, because they talk to me in my head while I drive or take my daily run. They’re insistent, opinionated, and sometimes smarter and funnier than I am. For sure they’ve got fewer inhibitions about what they’ll say. Come to think of it, they’ve already found their way into at least one real-life person’s heart: my own.

Uninhibited Mentors

June Shaw

Mom couldn’t see or hear well, but at her great-niece’s reception heard someone announce that all unmarried women should go up for the bride to toss her bouquet.

“Get me up there,” Mom told me.

I guided her to a spot behind all of the giggly bridesmaids and other friends of the newlyweds. The bride tossed – and the tall young woman in front of Mom caught it – and my ninety-year-old mother reached up and yanked the flowers out of that girl’s hands. The young women all disappeared, and the bride turned.

“Oh, Aunt Nora,” she said. “You caught my bouquet!”

A photographer appeared and snapped pictures for the wedding album of the bride and the woman who “caught” her bouquet, my mom.

Once the photos were done, Mom told me, “Let’s go find out who caught these. I should give them back.”

Oh, really? So why wait until now? I didn’t voice my thoughts, but we found the girl who’d actually caught the flowers and tried to return them.

Her boyfriend told Mom, “Oh no, we don’t want them. You keep them.”

I was relieved. And enchanted. Characters really do unusual actions. Terrific!

Relative Danger, my first in a series of humorous mysteries, was recently published.

“The main character is so much fun. She’s you!” many readers have told me.

Nope. She’s who I want to be – one woman with traits gleaned from some of my uninhibited mentors. My squeeze Bob is another one. He gets everybody in elevators and waiting rooms talking.

Once he came out of his urologist’s examining room and walked through his crowded waiting room and loudly said, “Ooh, he hurt me. He pulled the wrong tooth.”

Later he needed a procedure done at our hospital. His doctor wanted to pull a prank on some nurses there, so he asked Bob if he’d wear a furry pig costume to the hospital and all the way to the operating room. Bob said the nurses all went hog wild over him.

And then there’s my sister-in-law Lois who will say almost anything. Lois will not hold her tongue if she thinks someone has done something wrong that needs correcting. She seldom uses a quiet tone. If she’s in a room, people know it. And there are a few other uninhibited friends I am blessed to have. With all of my terrific mentors, why should I be the uninhibited one? I’m excited enough with being around them and experiencing their antics. And being inspired by each one of them.

You can see more of June and some of her uninhibited mentors at www.juneshaw.com.

The Naming of Characters

Sandra Parshall

T.S. Eliot wrote, “The naming of cats is a difficult matter,” and as a lifelong cat-owner, I agree -- but choosing a name for a fictional character takes difficulty to a whole new level. It’s a lot like naming a child. The recipient will live with your decision forever, and if you make a mistake the consequences won’t be pretty.

A baby, of course, is named before the parents have any idea how the kid will turn out. Will little Angelina develop into a tattooed hellion? Will Grace be a hopeless klutz? Or will their names in some way help to shape the people they become? I’m sure that somebody, somewhere, has spent a breathtaking amount of money studying such questions, but fortunately writers don’t have to wonder. We can form the characters, then give them names that suit. We can try out as many names as we like before deciding.

A character’s name has to do a lot of heavy lifting:

It should evoke personality. If a guy is always called Robert, never Bobby or even Bob, what does that say about him?

If ethnicity is important to the story, the name should convey that too. But you don’t have to call every Hispanic character Jose Gonzales. A little effort will turn up less common names that still tell the reader how to see the person.

A name can be a quick way to signal social status. I am not brave or foolish enough to reel off a list of low-class names and risk the fallout, but you know what I mean.

A name can tell us a character’s approximate age. How many toddlers do you know who are named Hortense or Archibald? How many 80-year-old women have you met who are named Britney or Morgan? The internet allows writers to search databases such as www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/ (compiled from Social Security records) and www.babycenter.com/general/ to find out what a character born in a certain year might have been named. Because I prefer classic names rather than the trendy concoctions that are going to seem laughable when their owners hit middle age and beyond, I’m happy to note that Emma has been the most popular name for baby girls in the U.S. for several years. We may have Ross and Rachel on Friends to thank for this. (I have a five-year-old named Emma, but although she believes herself to be an unusually hirsute little girl, she’s actually of the feline persuasion.) All those tiny Emmas, though, are growing up with a nearly equal number of girls named Madison. Aiden was the top male name in 2006, followed by Jacob, Ethan, Ryan, and Matthew. What will Madison and Aiden call their children twenty-five years from now?

The classics fit people of any age, but if the first name is a common one, the last might have to do double duty to give the character distinction. Kate is one of the most common names for female protagonists in mysteries, followed closely by all the variations of Katherine/Catherine/Kathleen -- Kat/Cat/Kathy/Katie/Kay. But Kate Shugak is singular, and so is Kay Scarpetta. In my new book, Disturbing the Dead, I named a lead character Tom Bridger, pairing a first name that conveys a solid, down-to-earth personality with a last name that is common among Melungeons in the Appalachians. The name Bridger is also a metaphor for the position that Tom, a half-Melungeon deputy sheriff, occupies between two segments of his mountain community. The reader may never think about this, but I have.

Sometimes a perfect name comes to a writer through sheer serendipity. When Tess Gerritsen was writing a book titled The Surgeon, she contributed to a charity auction by allowing a reader to purchase naming rights for a minor character, a female medical examiner. The reader named Dr. Maura Isles after a real person. The character grew in importance in subsequent books, and she grew into her name, which perfectly conveys the image of an elegant woman who is isolated within herself.

While searching for the perfect monikers for our characters, writers have to keep some no-no’s in mind: nothing that is impossible for the reader to pronounce; no two names starting with the same letter, lest the poor reader become confused; as few nicknames as possible, again to avoid confusion. Short, one-word names always have the edge, at least in English-language crime fiction. Look at a few U.S., Canadian, and British mystery novels. How many names of more than two or three syllables do you see? How many truly unusual names do you see? You could say this is laziness on the part of writers who don’t want to type long or difficult names again and again, and you might be half-right, but it’s also true that a mystery seems to move faster if everyone has a short, easy name.

A name is the most personal thing about a character, and the choice is not one the writer makes lightly. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could exercise the same discretion over our own names? As innocent babies, we have to take whatever label is slapped on us, whether it fits or not. But most names, amazingly enough, turn out to be good fits. How about yours? Do you love it, hate it, wish you could change it? What name would you have given yourself, and why?

The Mayor of Central Park

Elizabeth Zelvin

One of my favorite real life characters is Alberto Arroyo, a 91-year-old Puerto Rican American known to New Yorkers as the Mayor of Central Park. I didn’t know he was legendary and beloved when I first encountered him. I had recently started running around the Central Park reservoir for daily exercise. I run very, very slowly. A power walker can leave me in the dust. I’ve never succeeded in passing another runner, not even the octogenarian lady in the purple track suit I tried to catch up with for over a mile one time. So it was heartening when I began meeting the elderly gentleman who always greeted me as he passed. Each time he had a smile for me and a few words of encouragement.

Rain or shine, I’d see him making his way slowly along the track toward his favorite bench on the south side of the reservoir, unmistakable with his white hair, bushy white mustache, and cane. “Looking good!” he would call to me. Sometimes he would raise his face and both arms to the sky and say, “Beautiful day!” The first time I described him to someone who ran in the park, they said, “Oh, everybody knows him. That’s the Mayor of Central Park.” After that, I saw that many people, men and women of all ages, stopped to talk with him. He knew hundreds by name. “In my simple way,” he told me once, “I make a lot of people happy.”

After I got to know him, I heard Alberto’s stories. One woman stops by his bench periodically to give him a haircut. He is especially proud of his friendship with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, whom he courteously pretended not to recognize for years until the day she invited him to run with her. The stone Parks Department building near Alberto’s bench displays pictures and articles about him. Alberto came from Puerto Rico at the age of 21. Before settling in New York, he traveled in Europe, where the misery he saw prompted him to take a vow of poverty. He was the first person to use the path around the reservoir as a running track. From 1935 on, he ran there every single day. Only in the past few years have health problems kept him home now and then. I first introduced myself after writing a song about Alberto. He was delighted when I brought my guitar to the park and sang it for him. The very next day, I ran past him as he chatted with a couple of tourists. “That’s the woman who wrote a song about me,” I heard him say. I had become one of his stories.

Alberto uses a walker now. He gets to the park in early afternoon, and it sometimes takes him till after dark to get home. But he still makes his way around the track to his bench, which now bears a plaque honoring him. You can still occasionally see him standing on his head, a feat he used to perform daily. It still puts a big smile on my face to hear him call my name as I jog by. And sunshine or downpour or blizzard, he still says, “Beautiful day!”

Who's your favorite real life character?