Critique: WBL—What Body Language?

Sharon Wildwind
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Before I start my blog, here is an announcement from Darlene Ryan:

Thanks to everyone who entered our weekend giveaway. Since we came so close to 20 comments we picked two winners. "Anne" and "a paperback writer" will both be getting copies of "The Slime That Men Do." Please send me your mailing addresses to (darlene at darleneryan.com, change the "at" to @).
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“Good morning. My name is Sharon and I’m a short-hander.”

For years, I’ve expected my readers to figure out for themselves what was going on emotionally with my characters. It is the single biggest mistake I continue to make. Chapters I get back from my critique partners are littered with WBLs, so I’ve chosen what body language for the fifth, and last , in my series of blogs about common critique abbreviations that I use.

The women who has been most instrumental in me trying to turn this around is the writer and editor, Sherry Lewis. Much of what I’m saying in this blog came originally from her, and I have her permission to use it. Her web site is http://slbwrites.homestead.com/index.html

Let’s start with a little exercise with Jared, a thirteen-year-old boy.

Jared threw his jacket half on a hanger and kicked his trainers into the bottom of the closet. Food smells rolled out of the kitchen. He sniffed the air. Beans-and-franks. A burning sensation filled the back of his throat. He raced up the stairs, two at a time.

Before you scroll down, answer the following questions
1) What does the event means to Jared?
2) What is Jarod feeling?
3) What he will do next.

This photo has nothing to do with Jared. It’s just a place-holder, so you won’t scroll down to the possibilities by accident. Hmm, hmm, hmm. Done with the 3 questions? Okay, now scroll down.

Possibility #1

Laying on his stomach on the floor next to the twin bed he shared with his younger brothers, Jared groped under the bed for the locked tackle box. He unlocked the box and took out his precious jars of mustard, relish and ketchup. Big glass bottles that he'd bought on sale. Seventy per cent off. A treat for his younger brothers and sisters.

It didn't pay to leave glass around when his mother was high. Glass ended up broken. Tonight was going to be okay. Beans-and-franks meant his mother had stayed clean long enough to get a paycheck. He'd stay home tonight, clean the kitchen, make sure the precious jars were spirited away after supper and locked up, waiting for the next beans-and-franks night.

Possibility #2

Jared barely made it to the bathroom before he threw up. Retching into the toilet, bile and saliva dribbling down his chin, he beat his fist against the top of the toilet tank. Why couldn't Grammy listen? The nurse at the hospital had told her and told her that the chemotherapy made him sick and that meat smells were the worse of all. He hoped he'd be able to make it to the bathroom in time after supper.

Possibility #3

Jared rooted under a pile of clothes for his ball and glove. Flipping the ball into the air as he came down the steps whistling, he bounded for the kitchen, then skidded to a stop at the door.
George Tolliver turned from the stove, "Hey, kid. You're mom's running late tonight. I told her we could manage supper. It's just beans-and-franks."
"Yeah, I know. Omelets and beans-and-franks are the only things you know how to make," Jared said, grinning so hard his mouth hurt. "How was your trip?"
"Long."
"You got time to play catch?"
George dished out two plates. "Later. Sit down. Tell me how you've been the last couple of weeks."

Sherry Lewis’ six rules for revealing the character’s emotions:

Rule #1: What you do not write does not exist.
Rule #2: You can not assume that the reader knows what the character is feeling.

If I’d stopped with Jared’s throat burning, and him running up the stairs, in all likelihood the reader would have assumed a different emotional reaction, a different story, than the one I was trying to tell.

Rule #3: Resist the urge to hurry. Stay in the scene from second to second, from goal to disaster.

Particularly in first draft, I will write the scene in a “telling” format, more a set of notes to myself about what I want the scene to show. The third possibility was initially written like this:

Jared gets some object, a “guy thing.”
He’s really glad to see the guy who is cooking dinner, but he’s also scared because he can’t believe his good luck of this guy being in his life, and he’s afraid this special person will disappear out of his life.
The guy uses some body language that says things are okay.
Hint that there is a problems with the mother.
Jared and the guy reestablish their bond.
Aim for a bittersweet feeling: the guy cares about Jared, but . . .

Then, using Rules #4, 5 and 6 below, I fill in details

Rule #4: Use strong verbs.

rooted--flipping--bounded--skidded--manage

The first four imply movement, the last one has the bittersweet flavor I’m looking for. Jared and George aren’t on top of the world, they’re just managing.

Rule #5: Stimulus first, then reaction or you created that half-second delay that means you’re telling rather than showing.

I’ve had lively discussions with other writers about this one. Some writers feel just the opposite, reaction then stimulus. Use what feels comfortable for you.

I will remember the power of “why” in plotting I will try for at least 5 “levels of why,” in order to raise the stakes and go deep into character motivation. ~Jo Beverly, romance writer

What is the stimulus for Jared relating the way he does with George Tolliver? 1) Because life is tough for Jared. Why? 2) Because his mother is just barely hanging on. Why? 3) Because she's overwhelmed with raising a teenager alone. Why? 4) Because her husband left her, which destroyed her self-confidence and passing those feelings on to Jared has made him insecure. Why? 5) Jared thinks any good man who shows an interest in him will disappear out of his life.

Usually I have to get to reasons 4 or 5 before I see the real emotional connection, and that's the one I'll end up using in the story. Going through the process of diving down 5 times helps strip away the surface emotions.

Rule #6: Layer: dialog, body language, emotions leftover from a previous scene, sensory texture

I often do this the same way I handled Rule #3, as a list of notes to myself. Because I feel very strong in dialog, I often write all the characters’ lines first, then fill in the other three elements.

If I’m having real trouble with a scene, this exercise often helps break the impasse:
• Assign colors to the four elements. Dialog=red; body language=blue; leftover emotions=yellow; and sensory texture=green.
• Highlight and color what I’ve already written, either on the computer or get four different colors of markers and highlight the hard copy.
• Tape the pages on a wall or, if using the computer, adjust the page size so I can get all the scene pages on the screen.
• Walk away from the wall or screen, turn around, and look. The predominant color is easy to see; in my case, it’s almost always all red. Lots of dialog, not much of the other three elements.
• If I’m still stuck, I assign elements at random: blue--green--green--yellow--red--yellow--blue and so on. Being an old gamer, and still having a jar full of dice, I’ve even, in cases of extreme writers’ block, used the dice to randomly generate the colors.
• Then I challenge myself to write what those colors represent, in this case, body language--sensory texture--sensory texture--leftover emotion--dialog--leftover emotion--body language.
• Having done this, I can almost always take the elements, which may be out of order on the first pass, and rearrange them into some meaningful whole.

I’m taking the liberty of adding a rule #7, which finally came to me after I’d been using Sherry’s six rules for over a year.

Rule #7: Write until you can’t add a single thing to the character’s reaction without changing the entire tenor of the scene.

If we take the second possibility, Jared throwing up as a result of chemotherapy.

. . .He hoped he'd be able to make it to the bathroom in time after supper. Oh well, none of that mattered. It was time for the Simpson’s rerun.

The reader is going to go, “Huh? What just happened here?” This is a good clue that I’ve gotten beyond short-hand, that I've actually shown how the character emotionally reacts, and I've reached the end of the scene.

And we have reached the end of five abbreviations I’ve found useful for critique:
WBL—What body language, dialog, leftover emotions, and sensory texture will I use to convey the character’s emotional reaction? Have I asked "why?" 5 times, each time going deeper into the character's motivations?
PNS—stop Perfectly Nice Syndrome. Mess with the character's mind and her world.
STSS—stop telling, start showing
VSOP—ditch the back story; condense the context down, like Very Special Old Port, into something where every drop counts
VAD—use violence as another form of dialog
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Writing quote for the week:

Give your reader time to sink into one person’s mind and experience what’s going on there, before you yank them out and pull them into another mind. ~Beth Anderson, mystery and romance writer

Favorite Mysteries of a Birthday Boy

by Julia Buckley
Today is my husband's birthday; in his honor I thought I'd invite him to a book chat on Poe's Deadly Daughters, since he is a bit of a mystery fan, as well. It also gives me a chance to lure him away from the football games for a heart to heart talk. :)


Hi, Jeff.

Hi, Julia.

First of all, Happy Birthday. How old are you?

Guess.

I can’t tell from your hands. (Is anyone old enough to get that joke?)

I’m forty-seven years young.

Let’s talk about mysteries. Do you have a favorite?

I do. My favorite author is Robert B. Parker. The first Parker book I read will always be a favorite, and that’s Sudden Mischief, but there are about ten of his that I really like a lot. Another favorite Spenser book is The Judas Goat. There’s a scene in that book that I think really summarizes the Spenser character. He returns to his hotel after doing some investigating. He can tell that someone has entered his room, so he pushes the door open, but waits outside the room with his gun drawn. He knows there’s somebody in there and the person in there knows he’s out there. It becomes a contest to see who can wait out the other guy. Parker masterfully describes the tension. It goes on for I think a couple hours. Eventually, Spenser outwaits the guy, even though he’s hungry and his muscles are cramping up on him and sweat is dripping into his eyes. That scene, to me, sums up why he always comes out on top.

How did you come to discover the Spenser books?

I had jury duty, and I didn’t know how I would pass the time sitting in the Daley Center all day, and my lovely wife gave me Sudden Mischief because she thought I would enjoy it.

I ended up not getting called all day, so I spent the whole day reading the book. I finished it, I loved it, and then went on a Spenser reading rampage, during which I read the whole series.

Speaking of rampage, didn’t you once like the Mack Bolan Executioner Series, which is a very hard-boiled type of mystery?

Funny story, that. I saw them at a book fair, thought I would like them, bought about ten of them for a quarter a piece, read about two or three and discovered they were all basically the same book, so the rest remain unread in the basement. Wish I would have discovered them when I was about 13.

I happen to know you are also a Raymond Chandler fan. Do you prefer the hard boiled genre?

Absolutely.

Why?

I like the author’s word choices, the dialogue driven stories – the way they talk back to one another, the moody atmosphere.

What other authors do you like?

Elmore Leonard. I went through another phase during which I read him exclusively. I found out about Leonard because I read that he was Robert B. Parker’s favorite mystery writer. He really seems to have an insight into the criminal mind.

So would you say you’re sort of an obsessive reader?

Yeah, I get into grooves; if I like something, I want to read everything written by that person. I’m the same way with music. When I discover a band, I must own everything they’ve produced. I’ll listen to them exclusively for a few months, and then forget about them for years.

I read a lot of non-fiction too. Self-help books, fitness related stuff.

Do you have some other favorite mysteries?

Thanks to your advice, I’ve read Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe mysteries, and some Sherlock Holmes.

And of course you edit my manuscripts for me. Does it become burdensome to have a wife who is always handing you manuscripts?

I wouldn’t use the word burdensome, but we’re not always on the same schedule, as you know, and often when you hand me something you want me to do it immediately, and I’m the kind of person who tends to want to do things later. As you know.

Sometimes I have to re-edit them, due to a perceived lack of smiley faces in the margins.

There were three good laughs on that page alone.

What are you reading now?

I just ordered a copy of The Ruins; I’m a big Stephen King fan, and he wrote that it was the best horror novel of 2006. I haven’t been doing much reading lately, but I’ll have time to now that the Cubs’ season has abruptly ended.

Yeah, sorry about that.

Happy reading, and Happy Birthday!

Getting Motivated

By Darlene Ryan

Getting Motivated

Hugh Grant hanging out with Divine Brown. Donald Trump’s hair. Britney Spears lack of hair. If this were Jeopardy the question would be: “What the heck were you thinking?”

Take another look at your current manuscript. Are readers going to ask you that question? At some point in your story will they throw up their hands or just throw the book across the room?

Motivation. It’s one of the ways readers become invested in a character. Science fiction writer Nancy Kress was the fiction columnist for Writer’s Digest magazine several years ago. I can’t remember her exact words, but she explained motivation more or less like this in one of her columns: In real life people do things for silly, illogical and outright weird reasons. Or for no reason at all. But in a novel, characters need good reasons for what they do--if you want to keep readers hooked. Believable, realistic characters—characters who feel like real people instead of paper cutouts, don’t just react to drive your story. They behave like the people you created them to be.

Have you ever watched one of those hokey old movies where the heroine is alone in an isolated house when the power goes out? And of course, what does she do? She heads down into the pitch-dark cellar to check the fuses where the serial killer/vampire/escaped-prisoner-with-a-chainsaw is waiting. And watching we groan or throw our popcorn at the screen because who does that? In fact, who hangs out alone in creepy isolated houses in the middle of nowhere in the first place?

If you want your main character to do something that she (and anyone with any common sense, like your readers) wouldn’t normally do, you need to give her some compelling motivation—a reason that makes sense for that character in that circumstance.

Maybe the heroine is at the spooky house in the woods because she’s hiding from her ex who dislocated her shoulder and broke two of her ribs the last time she saw him. Maybe she heads for the basement when the lights go out because she knows he’s in the house, she knows he’ll follow her down there, she’s banking on that because she’s set up a little booby-trap on the fourth step from the top.

Or maybe the heroine is at the house because she needed a week away from her mother who keeps trying to get her to marry a nice boy and make babies before all her eggs shrivel up to dried out DNA. And maybe she heads to the basement when the power goes out because she knows there’s a quart of Rocky Road down there in the freezer and she just got off the phone with Mom.

Motivation can get tricky in mysteries where the main character isn’t involved in law enforcement in some way. Remember Jessica Fletcher? Okay, I confess I watched the show, but c’mon, the woman fell over a dead body every week and managed to catch the killer as well. After a while people should have been running the second they saw her coming. This is where you need to watch out for the lame excuse masquerading as motivation. If I see the guy who murdered my best friend while I’m shopping for shoes at the mall, yeah, I want him caught. But I’m going to dial 911, not chase him through the end of season clearance racks at the Gap.

Tim Cockey, author of the Hitchcock Sewell mysteries (Hearse of a Different Color, Backstabber) made Hitchcock an undertaker so the character would have a legitimate reason for being around so many dead people. Add to that a weakness for beautiful women in trouble and a deep loyalty to the friends who make up Hitch’s “family” and Cockey has some decent motivation for his character always being tied up in a murder investigation.

Margaret Maron’s Deborah Knott (Hard Row, Bootlegger’s Daughter) is a judge with a huge rowdy family, a husband in law enforcement and a father who’s often on the wrong side of the law—lots of ties to crime and lots of motivation to get mixed up in murder

Keep in mind motivation is different for everyone. A mother won’t do something that puts her children in danger, but she’ll face any danger to protect them. A loner will take different risks that someone with a big circle of friends. A younger person will probably take more chances that someone older--who is more likely to act on loyalty and longtime friendship.

Give your character a logical reason to act, a legitimate reason to get involved. And if you’re sending her down into the cellar make sure there’s a quart of Rocky Road down there in the freezer.

Since we're on the subject of motivation I'm going to give you all a chance--or possibly more than once chance--to find out what makes the average man act the way he does. Tell me what's the lamest motivation you've ever come across in a book or a movie in comments, or just say hello, and I'll enter your name for a chance to win The Slime Men Do, by Humble Howard Glassman--real stories from women about the crappy things some men do. For each copy of Slime that's sold a contribution will be made to the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation--and this month happens to be Breast Cancer Awareness month. So here's where it gets fun. If there are more than 20 comments here I'll give away two copies of the book. More than 40 comments I'll make it three copies, more than 60, four copies. One comment per person per email address please. And no, comments from my blogmates don't count. You have until midnight Sunday to comments. Check back Tuesday to find out who won.

Research: Like Salt To Mashed Potatoes, Part 3

ALL THE NEWS THAT’S FIT TO PRINT
or
What hidden gems can I dig out of the newspaper?



By Lonnie Cruse

Newspapers are an excellent source of information and inspiration for our writing, whether local or national, and I get a lot of ideas from the Metropolis Planet, our local paper that’s printed once a week as well as the Paducah Sun, a daily newspaper. I learned about Care Trak, an electronic program that keeps tabs on Alzheimer’s patients and handicapped children from an article in the Planet. That technology became central to my third mystery in the Metropolis Series, MARRIED IN METROPOLIS, and I’m donating a portion of my sales to the sheriff’s department to help them acquire more of this life-saving equipment.

Personally, I don’t scan the newspapers for “the big stories” about well-known people or events. Instead I look for the little odd stories that could only happen in real life. Fiction doesn’t get THAT strange. Like the guy who was arrested for DUI while on horseback? I mean, who knew the DUI laws stretched that far? I sure didn’t. Or the report in an out-of-town newspaper about a dead body found in the parking lot of a police department? And no one spotted the body for a whole day? Or how about the woman who was arrested for target practicing in her back yard while in the nude? The accompanying picture was a real hoot. Real live stories, gotta love ‘em. I also have in my research file the story of a circus performer who was killed in a fall. With the ropes and safety nets circus performers use today, fatal falls like that are rare. Make a great murder scenario, right? Romance gone wrong? Perhaps aliens snatched the “real” her and left a fake body? The basic idea would probably work in any genre.

The birth and obituary pages present great suggestions for interesting character names, not to mention other bits of information they include. The social pages can provide great ideas for romance writers. Ever notice how differently some of the brides and grooms dress? Ever read about their backgrounds (job, education, etc?) And there are stories about local functions that might work into our stories, chili suppers, golf or fishing tournaments, volunteer projects. Don’t neglect the sports section either. I recently cut out a story about an Eagles fan who was captured by team members while trying to scatter the ashes of his late mother on the football field, DURING A GAME! Lots of drama on those pages as well. The newspaper is probably one of the best resources we have, next to the Internet, and my newspaper research file is bulging.

Obviously we can’t print anything off the television or radio, but if it’s on their news reports, we can likely find it repeated in the newspaper or on the Internet and cut out or print a copy.

One more thing that is KEY to searching for new ideas while researching. The “What if?” question again. While reading or researching, no matter what genre you write, ask yourself that question often, “What if” this or that happened? What if this wasn’t an accident but murder? What if the bride and groom didn’t get married after all? What if the kid who won the spelling bee was really an alien from another planet? What if the missing dog pictured with a family was really a fairy turned into a Collie by an angry rival? The possibilities of “What if?” will lead you in many directions. Just be sure you file the original story for future inspiration/research.

SUGGESTION: If you don’t already subscribe, buy, beg, or borrow a newspaper (local or large city, doesn’t matter) and read through it carefully. As you read, cut out ANY and ALL articles that catch your eye right then. (If you wait until you’ve finished reading, you might forget which story you wanted when you go back through. However, do remember to let the rest of the family read it first so you don’t drive them nuts reading around the holes.) Articles do NOT have to be directly related to what genre you write. Let your subconscious be your guide.

I cut out an article from the Metropolis Planet about a local River Sweep volunteer project and stuck it into my Research Folder because it interested me, and I thought I’d like to participate in the event some time. Metropolis, Illinois is situated on the banks of the Ohio River. Each year volunteers gather to walk the river bank for a goodly distance and pick up trash. Wonderful way to take care of not only litterbugs but the flotsam and jetsam carried down river every flood season. Turns out, in my third book, MARRIED IN METROPOLIS, I needed a way for a very large clue to be found at the river’s edge. I sent one of my fictional sheriff’s deputies to the River Sweep as a volunteer, and the clue was discovered. Local readers will recognize the River Sweep, making the story more real to them, but if I hadn’t been researching through the newspaper, I couldn’t have tied that scene to reality in quite that way.

When the Ferry Is a Time Machine

Elizabeth Zelvin

I recently took a short ferry ride from the Battery, at the tip of Manhattan, through New York Harbor past the Statue of Liberty to Ellis Island, a trip that cost $9.50 and traveled 100 years into my family’s past.
The gateway to America for 12 million immigrants from all over the world in search of a better life between 1892 and 1954, Ellis Island has been completely restored and is now managed by the National Park Service as a monument to the melting pot that shaped American culture.

A French friend visiting from Paris suggested we go, but this was no mere museum trip or history lesson for me. Both my parents came to America through Ellis Island: my father from Ekaterinaslav in the Ukraine in 1905 at the age of six, and my mother from Papa in Hungary in 1906 at the age of four. I’ve always regretted that I never visited Ellis Island with them.
They went with a cousin shortly after the restoration in the 1980s, and both said that they remembered the Registry Room with its vaulted ceilings and high arched windows.
My mother’s most vivid memory was of her own mother, my grandmother, crying as she said goodbye to her mother, whom she knew she would never see again. My father remembered being given a banana as he waited to board the ship, and how, puzzled by this strange fruit, he bit into it skin and all.

The night before our excursion, I looked up Ellis Island on the Internet. The site www.ellisisland.com offers information about the Immigration Museum, while www.ellisisland.org allows users to search for passengers on the ships that brought the immigrants past the Statue of Liberty to Ellis Island. At the click of a mouse, I found both my father, on the ship’s manifest of the Caronia out of Liverpool and my mother, listed as a passenger on the Deutschland, departing from Hamburg. I discovered that my Aunt Anna and my Aunt Sophie, younger than my father, were actually named Chane and Schifre. I already knew that my mother, named Judith (and called Judy her whole life, till she died at 96), got an inadvertent name change at Ellis Island, when an immigration official heard the Hungarian pronunciation Yoo-deet and wrote down “Edith”—which is how she was listed on the records I found. (Her official signature was always “Edith Judith” or “Edith J.”—though the only people who called her Edith were telemarketers.)

The cousin who visited the museum with my parents enrolled my mother’s mother, our beloved Gran, on the American Immigrant Wall of Honor outside the Great Hall, overlooking the harbor and the Lower Manhattan skyline.
When I emailed him, he reminded me that at the time, none of the cousins wanted to pay the hundred bucks to list our grandfather, who died long before we were born. Now I think I might go back to www.wallofhonor.com and do it. I was moved to find my grandmother’s name among the 700,000 remembered in this beautiful and historic spot.

Bad Company

Sandra Parshall

In general, I don’t enjoy the company of serial killers.

I mean the fictional kind, of course. Like most writers of crime novels, I’d be scared witless to encounter one in person.

Literary serial killers often seem more focused on their relationships with the police and FBI than on murder itself. They’re heavily into bet-you-can’t-catch-me games and prone to writing jokey, taunting letters to their cop pals. When they’re finally caught at the end of the story, they often crave praise from the cops for their cleverness. I was good, wasn’t I? There's something almost sexual about it, and not in an enjoyable way.

Before we reach that point, we're likely to get lots of scenes in which the killer cackles maniacally as he plots his next crime and savors the shock he’s about to deliver not only to his victim but to the cops and FBI. It also seems essential in fiction that every serial killer be given a snappy nickname, so the writer dreams up a “trademark” that will spawn one. If the killer writes messages to the cops on sticky notes and attaches them to his victim’s foreheads, he can be The Sticky Note Killer and everyone in the book will begin to suspect friends and co-workers who leave sticky note reminders on desks and refrigerator doors and calendars. This adds tension.

From what I’ve read about real-life serial killers, they’re a sad, sick bunch, immersed in the darkness of their own minds and souls, and focused obsessively on satisfying an urge that most of us can never understand. Killing is what matters to them. The clever killer who taunts the police and revels in the chase is rare in reality.

A lot of mysteries and thrillers are utterly unbelievable, but if I’m entertained I usually don’t care. However, most serial killer novels are dead serious, if you’ll pardon the expression, and they’re supposed to “entertain” by scaring us. To be scared, I have to believe that the threat could be real, that I could encounter it in my own life. So when I open a novel to find a detective and a serial killer carrying on a warped version of courtship, I’m inclined to mutter Give me a break and close the book. Writing in the killer’s voice, and making him scary rather than ludicrous, is especially hard to pull off. Few writers have done it convincingly.

Which brings me to Jeff Lindsay and Dexter.

Why do I like Dexter so much? He’s not especially handsome or charming or witty (although the Dexter books drip with black humor). Dexter was bent forever when his mother was slaughtered in front of him and he, a small child, was left to sit in her blood for days before being rescued by the cop who became his foster father. He feels an urge to kill, but he gives in only when he comes across someone who genuinely deserves his attention. He dispatched a hospital nurse who was trying to euthanize his foster father. He murdered a priest who had molested children. He kills other killers who prey on the innocent. His victims are carefully chosen. He rids the world – let’s be honest here – of the scum we all occasionally wish we could bump off. Dexter doesn’t play cat and mouse games with the cops. He works with them as a blood evidence analyst, and he’s deeply afraid of being found out. Now and then he yearns to be normal, to really be the person he pretends to be, but he knows that normalcy would bore him out of his mind.

Usually I try to avoid serial killer novels, preferring instead stories of ordinary people driven to extremes by some upheaval or betrayal in their lives. Dexter is the only serial killer I’ve been able to read about repeatedly without becoming totally repulsed. (I lost interest in Hannibal Lecter long ago, and don’t get me started about Patricia Cornwell’s French werewolf.) On the whole, I like the Showtime series based on the Dexter books, but only the written word does full justice to the character.

I don’t know how long Lindsay can keep Dexter's story going, but if the author remains faithful to the character and doesn’t slip into the cliches that mar so many serial killer books, I’ll continue to enjoy Dexter's company.

Critique—PNS: Perfectly Nice Syndrome

Sharon Wildwind

This is the fourth critique abbreviation that shows up frequently in my manuscripts. Next week, we finish up the series.

A fellow writer once described to me her elaborate plot, which involved jealousy, revenge, and a woman’s ruined reputation. I was enthralled until she leaned back and said, “Of course, at the end, it turns out to be all a misunderstanding. None of the characters are really bad; it’s just a case of mistaken identity.”

Her characters were suffering from a bad case of perfectly nice syndrome and, in the end, it killed her book and she was never able to finish it.

Robert Heinlein, in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, referred to this as TANSTAAFL, pronounced tan-staffle. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

PNS (Perfectly Nice Syndrome)—a term I learned from the writer Sherry Lewis—is much shorter to write.

Free lunches served in bars was popularized in the United States in the last quarter of the 1800s. The Spanish had been doing for centuries with tapas. We see it today in the bowl of chips or pretzels found in many bars, pubs, and taverns.

Whether it was the oyster soup, roast meat, and buttered bread found in high-end New Orleans clubs or the sausages, pickles, and cheese in less lofty establishments, free food had one thing in common. Salt: a hidden invitation to purchase more drinks.

In the same way, getting rid of PNS invites the reader to be more involved with the characters and to keep reading.

Perfectly Nice Syndrome usually shows up in one of two ways:

First, like my author friend above, none of the characters are really bad. It’s just a case of mistaken identity. The reader is led through a series of events designed to make them mistrust the protagonist’s boyfriend only to discover that the women he escorted around town was not only his cousin, but a nun to boot. The final revelation is akin to Orson Wells coming out of character at the end of the War of the Worlds radio broadcast to say he’d dressed up in a sheet and said “Boo” to the listeners.

Actions should have consequences, and characters should have flaws. Yes, the boyfriend really was cheating on the protagonist. Yes, he did go to bed with the other woman. Yes, he did catch a sexually-transmitted disease from her. Now the protagonist and boyfriend have to deal with the consequences. Maybe they will learn to trust one another again, maybe they won’t, but in either case, the writer has a lot more to work with than an actor in a sheet.

Second, the author has her eyes so firmly set on the plot that she glosses over significant moments. Suppose our character is in heavy traffic and a guy cuts in front of her.

Pearl slammed on her brakes, stopping inches away from the pickup’s rear bumper. How in the world was she going to get into the art gallery after hours? Perhaps Mabel would have an idea.

What? No reaction to almost creaming into the back of a pickup?

A significant moment tests a character’s perception of herself. It doesn’t have to be a big thing; in fact, most of us have dozens of significant moments every day. A guy changes lanes too fast and we almost slam into his rear bumper. A co-workers makes an comment that angers or hurt us. Our child’s school sends an e-mail that says, “Please make an appointment with the principal as soon as possible.”

Do we react? Of course we do. We might curse the driver or pray for his safety. We might turn on the co-worker or fume silently at our desk. We might grab the phone and demand to see the principal in the next ten minutes, or delete the e-mail, hoping if we pretend that we never got it, the problem, whatever it is, will blow over.

Does that mean our characters must react to each significant event, even a broken fingernail?

Pretty much.

The obvious thing is to leave out all events that aren’t significant to the book. Why have the protagonist break a fingernail unless it will lead her to the manicurist who leads her to the victim’s aunt, who knows a clue the protagonist didn’t even know she needed?

Most reactions can be short.

Pearl slammed on her brakes, stopping inches away from the pickup’s rear bumper. Her heart pounding, she bent her forehead to touch the steering wheel. “Lord, slow that crazy fool down and keep him safe until he has the good sense to listen to You.”

The pick-up turned right, fading out of Pearl’s sight and thought. How in the world was she going to get into the art gallery after hours? Perhaps Mabel would have an idea.

What have I learned about Pearl now? She has good reflexes for a 72-year-old woman. She’s more religious than spiteful, she prays for her enemies, and she has a sense of humor.

Every rose has a thorn. Every beautiful sunset includes bats swarming out of the old mill. Every favor demands payback—preferably at the most inopportune time. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

Margaret Atwood on an Ancient Mystery

by Julia Buckley
I recently read The Odyssey for the first time; then I read Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad, which is a wonderful, delightful, intelligent re-imagining of the Penelope of Ancient Ithaca. The book's flyleaf suggests that she asks what we might ask at the beginning of any mystery: "What led to the hanging of [Penelope's] maids, and what was Penelope really up to?"

Atwood allows Penelope a more fleshed-out back story than The Odyssey provides, giving Penelope immediate importance as narrator and an ironic voice which serves to render the “heroic” notion of her husband’s tale immediately suspect. She begins with Penelope’s summary of her own birth and childhood: “My mother was a Naiad. Daughters of Naiads were a dime a dozen in those days; the place was crawling with them. Nevertheless, it never hurts to be of semi-divine birth. Or it never hurts immediately."

Atwood often lets Penelope use an ironic modern idiom that the past would never have allowed her. Penelope derives freedom of language by being dead, in the Underworld, and is free to use whatever expression she finds appropriate, from whatever time. In saying that girls like her were “a dime a dozen,” Penelope dismisses the solemn, majestic tone implied by The Odyssey and brings a more human tone to the story.

One of the best ways Atwood employs modern idioms is in Penelope describing herself. Her self-image, according to this telling of the story, was always in question, and it truly is a myth, Penelope asserts, to say that she was beautiful. She was a part of the dowry, in a sense, but all of the treasure turned out to be meaningless in the end. She describes her own suitors and the day of her marriage: “The palace women have dolled me up as best they can, minstrels have composed songs in my honor—‘radiant as Aphrodite’, and all the usual claptrap—but I feel shy and miserable. . . . I know it’s not me they’re after, not Penelope the Duck. It’s only what comes with me—the royal connection, the pile of glittering junk. No man will ever kill himself for love of me."

Atwood’s use of modern—-and disparaging—-terms give Penelope a sense of wisdom, a stance that does not allow for mythologizing.

This past July the Royal Shakespeare Company (in production with the Ottawa Theatre Company) performed a version of The Penelopiad adapted for the stage by Atwood herself and presented at the Swan Theatre at Stratford-Upon-Avon. Reviews have been good, and I'm hoping to see it performed elsewhere now.

I love the fact that Atwood has taken an ancient mystery--and those are the most fascinating mysteries of all--and tried to shed light on the inscrutable thoughts and behaviors, not just of the characters of The Odyssey, but of its writer.

Son of a Guffin

Lillian Stewart Carl (Guest Blogger)

When I began a new mystery series several years ago, I never thought of setting it anywhere besides Scotland.
The country is less awash with rain than with blood. For a historian like myself—and like my heroine, Jean Fairbairn—historical MacGuffins line the roads like thistles. I use the word “MacGuffin” not only to mean the object that instigates the story and is relevant to its solution, but because of its Scottish “mac” prefix, meaning “son of”. “Sonofaguffin” makes a great swear word, doesn’t it?

The Jean Fairbairn/Alasdair Cameron series is one of my usual cross-genre blends, part-paranormal, part-romance, mostly mystery. I’ve subtitled it, “Scotland’s finest and America’s exile on the trail of all-too-living legends.” In other words, my Caledonian cop-cum-security chief and my expatriate history professor-cum-journalist find themselves solving murders motivated by a historical or legendary object: the MacGuffin.

In The Secret Portrait, an old man asks Jean’s help taking a gold coin of Louis XIV to the Museum of Scotland. (Her friends Michael and Rebecca Campbell-Reid, from my earlier Ashes to Ashes series, work there.) Jean suspects that the coin comes from the long-lost hoard of Bonnie Prince Charlie, a.k.a. Charles Edward Stewart, the Young Pretender, who was as feckless in real life as he is romantic in legend. The gilt (and guilt) of that legend as well as the glitter of gold leads to murder—and to the first meeting of Jean and Alasdair Cameron.

In The Murder Hole, Jean travels to Loch Ness to write about a stone carved by the cryptic ancient Picts, as well as to interview an American businessman intent on proving the existence of the Loch Ness monster. Nessie, an enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in the Scottish tourist industry—and the MacGuffin of more than my tale—is choice fodder for Great Scot, Jean’s history and tourism magazine. Until the question of Nessie’s existence leads to murder. Alasdair Cameron is on the case. And on Jean’s nerves again, not altogether unpleasantly.

“Do you believe Nessie exists?” Jean asks him.

“I’m after keeping my fantasy compartmented,” he replies.

But as a detective, his business hinges on fantasy just as much as Jean’s does. For it doesn’t matter whether what someone believes is true, as long as they’re willing to act on those beliefs.

In The Burning Glass, Jean and Alasdair are a couple, not a thistle and a rose but two thistles. They travel to the Scottish borders to keep an eye on a ruined chapel. I’d originally intended to use Rosslyn Chapel as the MacGuffin—yes, the Rosslyn Chapel outside Edinburgh, the one teeming with intricate stonecarvings and even more intricate legends. But before I could start my own story, Rosslyn was featured in The Da Vinci Code. (Sonofaguffin!)So with the stroke of a pixel, I created Ferniebank, built by the same hands as Rosslyn.

In The Burning Glass, tourists overflow Rosslyn and descend upon Ferniebank, the owner plans its conversion to a New Age spa, and what looks like a simple case of myth-mongering becomes a mad mouse ride through historical fantasy.

“There’s nothing wrong with myth,” Jean insists, while Alasdair retorts, “The danger comes in hiding from the fact that they are myths.”

My MacGuffins are not just objects of memory and desire—manuscripts, jewelry, bones—but legends as well. They proliferate, they mutate, and then they kill. For it doesn’t matter what drives the traffic in myths. It’s a lucrative business, and greed is a time-honored motive. Just ask the man with Prince Charlie’s Louis d’Or and a sense of honor much more finely-honed than the prince’s. Just ask the man chasing a crypto-zoological chimera like Nessie as well as his own ego. Just ask the people of the village that suffers a string of mysterious deaths because one clever author turned several time-tattered tales into a bestseller.

A scene in The Secret Portrait takes place at the Clan Cameron Museum in the Western Highlands. Alasdair, as a card-carrying member of clan Cameron, could tell you that the old Cameron war cry was a promise to feed their enemies to dogs: “Sons of the hounds, come here and get flesh!” Maybe the cry of the Jean Fairbairn/Alasdair Cameron series should be, “Sons of the guffins, come here and get story!”

Research: Like Salt to Mashed Potatoes, Part 2

SURF’S UP!
or
How can the Internet become my best friend?

By Lonnie Cruse

Researching today is a thousand times easier than before the dawn of the Internet. (And is anyone here besides me old enough to remember the excitement of owning your own set of World Book Encyclopedias so you didn’t have to spend time at the library researching a report? Kids today don’t know how lucky they are.) We writers can find information on just about any subject we need to on the Internet. We can type the key words of the subject into our browsers or use one of the many search engines (Yahoo!, Jeeves, Google, etc.) and links to thousands of web pages will pop up, WAAAAAY more than we’ll ever have time to read. And chances are the information we get in these searches will be pretty accurate. I love printing out whatever information I need and keeping it handy without having a ton of heavy books sitting on my desk. Might want to bookmark the best websites you find if you think you’ll be using them again.

Tip: When you connect to the Internet to begin a search for information on a particular subject, check your e-mail, play games, or whatever it is you want to do, many browsers like Yahoo! show the current hot news stories. If one of those news stories catches your eye, check it out right that minute, before it’s replaced by an even hotter news story, even if it’s about a subject you aren’t writing about at the time. If the news item caught your eye, interested you enough to read it, chances are good your subconscious is telling you it would work well in a story somewhere down the road.

A couple of years ago I saw a story about an accident at a nursing home that killed some of the residents and injured others. I followed that story for several days and printed out the pages. The authorities concluded it was an accident, but the “What if?” question kept bugging me, and I thought it would be a great way for a killer to get rid of several victims at once, and hide his/her identity at the same time. That news story became a center support beam for my second mystery. IF your brain is signaling you “What if?” don’t ignore it no matter what genre you write! You might not find that information so easily later on.

Back to researching on the Internet. Recently I’ve been researching botulism as a way to poison a character. Since I’d home canned various veggies and fruits years ago when my kids were small to help supplement the family grocery budget and had read up on safety measures then, I figured I knew a lot about the subject. And we all pretty much know not to buy dented cans of fruit or vegetables at the grocery store. But I figured I’d better check the subject out on the Internet anyhow and make sure I had my facts straight. I knew I’d get better information on the subject on the Internet rather than re-reading my old, outdated canning books. Turns out, the canned fruit I wanted to use probably wouldn’t work because it has too much acid, which helps prevent botulism from forming. And who knew baked potatoes (wrapped in aluminum foil) not kept at the correct temperature before serving could cause botulism poisoning because potatoes are grown in dirt? Certainly not me! I found that information interesting enough to want to use it, either in my work-in-progress or a future story.

Thoroughly researching a subject on the Internet will often lead writers into side issues of the subject, and from there into an entirely different area, giving us not only a wealth of information, but new story ideas as well. Ideas we can use now or later.

When you search for information on a subject, usually the search engines will point you to various websites run by experts who will either have the information you need posted there, or will answer your questions via email. If it’s a health or safety issue, chances are there will be a discussion board you can click into for more information. Word of caution, check SEVERAL websites on ANY subject to gather information as some sites may be phony or running a scam. If several sites give the same information and appear to be run by knowledgeable people in that field, then you’ve hit a gold mine.

Some websites function like dictionaries and/or encyclopedias and will have helpful information as well. And if all you need is a definition, or maybe a spelling or common usage of a word, try http://www.factmonster.com/ It was created for kids doing homework, but adults can get tons of helpful information off that site. And it’s free. There are plenty of free informational sites we can use, so avoid the pay sites.

If you are researching a city to write about, even a small one like Metropolis, Illinois where I live, chances are they have a website with a multitude of info about local businesses, tourist attractions, history, accommodations, transportation, and most important, some even have maps with street and highway names. Extremely helpful if you are writing about a place you haven’t lived in for many years and therefore don’t know the area inch by inch.

By the way, on the search page you will likely see offers to buy whatever it is you’re researching at Amazon or on eBay, but last time I looked, Metropolis wasn’t up for sale at either place.

So, if we writers can’t afford to fly to some romantic or spooky or touristy area to research it for our story, we can find out all we need to know to make our story believable to our readers by researching the location on the Internet. And did you know there are websites with satellite pictures of practically every place on earth so we can “visit” any place we want to from above? A friend recently helped me find a picture of our house taken from a satellite.

We can find information about history, science, romance, famous people, legal issues and laws, anything we need to know, on just about any subject, on the Internet. So if you have no clue where to start looking for research information on a particular subject, start with your browser.

Tip #2: If SPAM email irritates you as much as it does the rest of the world, here’s a tip for getting revenge and finding new character names for your story on the Internet, and it’s free. I have writer friends who use the ‘send’ names from SPAM emails they receive for their characters’ names. You have to admit, some of those spammers’ fictitious names ARE pretty original.

SUGGESTION: Choose any subject you’d like to research and key the term into your browser. Open and read a couple of articles on the subject and print at least one article, map, description, or other piece of information out to save in your research folder.

In the fourth book I wrote, I needed information about a collapsed lung because my character was going to have a serious car accident and I wanted her to have to deal with that particular medical emergency. I asked a friend who is a nurse, and she loaned me a medical book heavy enough sink a ship. We’ll be discussing using experts for research in another post, but in this case, I couldn’t make heads or tails of the book. I keyed in “collapsed lung” to my browser, and I got exactly the information I needed regarding symptoms, treatment, precautions after treatment to prevent a recurrence, etc.

Any questions?