Writing Murder

S.M. Harding (Guest Blogger)

S. M. Harding is the author of twenty-four published short stories, a photographer, and editor of Writing Murder, a collection of essays by Midwest crime and mystery authors. The handy primer on the art of crime fiction is based on a successful lecture program held at Jim Huang’s The Mystery Company and was compiled to benefit the Writers’ Center of Indiana.

Imagine, if you will, a 135-year-old cabin nestled at 8400 feet in the foothills of the San Juan Mountains of northern New Mexico.

For those of you who read James D. Doss, the cabin is about twenty-five miles south of Caňon del Espiritu as the raven flies. The season is winter, snow falls on alternate days with bright sunshine, and the road across the mountains to Taos is closed more often than it’s open. Snow and silence punctuated by the flap of raven wings.

I’ve read every mystery novel I own at least twice. Though I have an Internet connection, Amazon doesn’t yet exist. What to do to fill the hours between chores, cross-country skiing, and feeding piňón to the wood stove? The only logical choice: write my own mystery.

I did – and had a great time as the story unfolded. That first draft rests in a bottom file drawer, unattended now for many years. Since that winter, I’ve learned a lot. I’ve discovered four basic principles as a way of self-editing – I’ve got them taped to my computer and use them as a checklist.

The first is agency. This is a reminder that my writing should be active, not passive. It applies from using active voice in verb choice to a protagonist who keeps moving toward her goal regardless of obstacles.

Tension is crucial to plot, but also to characters’ internal and/or external choices, or in the way the setting represents the progression of the plot.

While a plot must be believable, so must the culture, place, and character motivations. Why would a character do that? Understand why, don’t explain it, but show why.

Superflux, a word which comes from superfluous, and means too much: too much back story, too much meaningless dialogue, too much technical explanation. I believe mystery readers are some of the smartest readers around – honor their intelligence by leaving out explanations. They’ll get it. Honest.

Writing is weaving a web: each filament – setting, character, plot, dialogue, voice – is separate, yet they combine and interact to make the whole strong.

If you’ve ever said, “I have this idea for a mystery novel . . .,” then I’d encourage you to begin writing. And I hope you enjoy it as much as I did that blessed winter in New Mexico.

What do writers want?

by Sandra Parshall

In the past, nobody except writers themselves cared much about what writers wanted from the publishing experience, because we were the least powerful people in the process of bringing books to readers. 

We were the crazy ones: we were addicted to writing, everybody knew we would write even if we didn't get paid, we would let an agent keep a manuscript exclusively for six months before rejecting it, we accepted that it might take years to find a publisher, we would grab any lousy deal that was offered because we were so desperate and so grateful to get published.

Now – or so I keep hearing – changes in the industry have given writers all the power, and suddenly a lot of people care what we want.

Digital Book World and Writer’s Digest co-sponsored a survey of 5,000 aspiring, self-published only, traditionally-published only, and “hybrid” (traditional and self-published) authors to get their views on a wide range of issues. Some of the results should be eye-openers for both publishers and writers. The detailed report is for sale for a hefty price through Digital Book World, but last week I listened to a free webinar that covered all the key findings. Following the data presentation, a discussion featuring survey co-authors Jeremy Greenfield of DBW and Phil Sexton of WD, along with hybrid author and Cool Gus Publishing founder Bob Mayer, was equally enlightening.

Perhaps the least surprising finding was that writers who have done both are the most savvy about self-publishing and traditional publishing. They’re the most flexible, the most aggressive about getting deals that benefit them, and they make the most money. Among the writers surveyed, the average annual incomes were $7,630 for self-published writers; $27,758 for the  traditionally published; and $38,540 for hybrid writers.

Money isn’t the biggest factor driving most authors, though. Having a writing career, being able to reach readers, is what matters above everything else. For some, self-publishing is the only way to achieve that, because a lot of traditional publishers have no interest in books that won’t generate big sales.

The “best” writers, in a purely commercial sense – the ones most likely to attract a large audience – do have a choice between traditional publishing and self-publishing. How can traditional publishers attract and hang on to those profitable authors?

Even self-published writers acknowledge the prestige of having a book published and distributed by a respected imprint. The ability to get books into brick-and-mortar stores is also a plus. And many writers simply don’t want the hassle of managing the publishing process themselves.

The author-editor relationship at a print publisher, however, isn’t a big draw for either traditionally published or hybrid authors, the writers who have actually worked with editors. During the discussion, the panelists talked about the pressure on editors to be “book processors” rather than partners with writers, especially when the authors are midlist and not likely to bring in a lot of money.

Traditionally published only authors are the least likely to want more creative control. Hybrid authors, having experienced the freedom of self-publishing, want more of a say in how their work is produced by traditional publishers. If a print publisher can’t provide added value, those writers will go elsewhere. The panelists agreed that publishers must learn how to serve authors better by providing things the writers can’t easily do for themselves.

Marketing and distribution would seem to be traditional publishing’s strong points, but writers across the board realize that only a small percentage (panelists estimated 5-10%) of books receive any kind of marketing investment. The money and time required for promotion must come almost entirely from the author. Regardless of how a book is published, its success or failure is usually a result of the writer’s efforts, and most authors know that going in.

One thing traditional publishers can offer, because a lot of writers don’t understand it, is the management of meta-data, which is key to “discoverability” for a book online. Tweaking a book’s meta-data can have a big effect on its sales, but many authors don’t have a clue about this aspect of marketing or they don’t want to invest the time to do it properly. Writers, after all, must write if they’re going to have a product to sell, and nothing can eat into precious writing time the way marketing can.

The panelists warned, though, that big publishers are just beginning to get a handle on online marketing. They’re learning that they can’t depend on Facebook and Twitter for everything – and that social media marketing is not free. Somebody who understands it has to be paid to do it right.

Writers who want to self-publish also have to learn that nothing is free. Good editing is essential, and good editors aren’t cheap. People with no credentials and no expertise are popping up everywhere to offer their editing services, and aspiring writers must be careful in vetting anyone they consider hiring. Good covers, even for e-books, are also vital, and finding a talented artist whose fee won’t bankrupt you can take some effort. The page  layout must also look professional. As the panelists in the online presentation said more than once, there’s a lot more to self-publishing than pressing a button.

Drawing on the survey data, the panelists had some additional advice for aspiring writers: Don’t wait until you’re published, in whatever form, to begin building your audience. Only a small percentage of the aspiring writers who responded to the survey said they already have websites, blogs, and Facebook pages. If they decide to self-publish, they’ll be starting from scratch, with no audience waiting for their work. If they want to publish traditionally, they’ll discover that a strong social media presence is a big selling point with both agents and editors. If you can bring a ready-made audience with you, you’ll be way ahead of the competition.

You Had Me at Hello

Sharon Wildwind

According to the New Yorker, Pulitzer-winning author Philip Roth and newly-published writer Julian Tepper had a small lifestyle opinion difference in a New York deli.

Tepper presented Roth with a copy of Teppler’s first novel. Roth supposedly advised him to give up writing because being a writer was a soul-killing way to spend one’s life. The Paris Review Daily published an essay Teppler wrote about the encounter.

Enter into the fray Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Signature of All Things). She defended writing and writers.

Enter Avi Steinberg. who wrote the New Yorker article referred to above. This is not a he said, he said, she said, he said blog. There are links. Anyone can read what was reported for herself. What stopped me in my tracks was when Steinberg ended his piece ended with this quote

“That’s the kind of a person it takes to be a writer: someone who’s zealous and ready to argue, someone who has Philip Roth tell him, “It’s torture, don’t do it,” and replies, “You had me at ‘torture.’”

That’s a play on Dorothy Boyd’s line from the movie Jerry Maguire. “You had me at hello.” With the implication being that writers are innately love with torture and would love a profession in which they experienced it.

I laughed. I pumped air and said, “Go, Avi.” I copied the quote and put it in my inspiration folder. In short, I had a hugely politically-incorrect moment. Once in a while it’s relief to have someone tell it like it is, and at the same time, an embarrassment that I would make a joke out of torture. In some countries, being a writer leads to torture. The real kind. The nasty kind, and yet writers endure.

For many of us torture isn’t what other people do to us, it’s what we do to ourselves. It’s doubt, self-recriminations, feelings I should have done this and that different. Put more effort into writing. Promoted the book harder. Stood up to that editor. Caught that stupid mistake in the proofs. Demanded a retraction on that horrible review.

I’ve never heard a writer, no matter how well established, say, “After a while all doubts go away. I get up every morning knowing that I’m a sane, competent writer, who is solidly on the career track I laid out for myself.” But I’ve heard a lot of writers say, “I’m not sure I can pull off this new book, these new characters, this different kind of marketing plan. I’m having a hard time right now with the beginning, the middle, or the end.” None of us are sure, but a lot of us are working very hard to cope, even to thrive.

Coping, day in and day out, gets horribly tiring. In general, our society isn’t set up to lay laurels upon our creative brow. We survive on grants and grants get cut. We have the good fortune to bond with a wonderful agent or editor. They move or leave the business or get sick or even die and we have to start over. The publishing rules change and the book we wrote under the old rules is now unsalable. The question I get most often from people I see occasionally is, “Are you still writing?”

It’s not the question, it’s the tone in the question, with the hidden meaning being, “Surely by now you’ve come to your senses and moved on to something more productive?”

Yep, still writing. Still here. Still coping. Still living the writer’s life, and darn glad of it.

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Quote for the week

May all beings be safe and protected.

May all beings be peaceful and happy.

May all beings be healthy and strong.

May all beings have ease of well being.

~ Mantra for Metta meditation

Congratulations, Sheila Connolly!!

Congratulations to Deadly Daughter Sheila Connolly, who has been nominated for a 2013 Agatha Award for her short story, "Kept in the Dark."

Sheila, you've done us proud!!

A Lesson in Resilience

by Julia Buckley

Did you ever have days in which you feel a bit battered by life? When you, in the midst of trying to deal with one conflict, are buffetted by another, and another?

We all sometimes feel that way.

Which is why, perhaps, this video resonates so strongly.  Tell me whether it makes you want to laugh or cry.






When I first saw the video, I was terrified for the ducks, especially when even the mother, who sought to gather them, was consumed by a force larger than herself.  And yet--instinctively--they go with the flow, let the wind take them where it will, and then get up.

I think about this video often; I've showed it to family, friends, students.  It's a lesson in determination, acceptance, and resilience.  At the end, no one is lost, order is maintained, and a family reunited.

Once I was assured that no ducks were harmed, I saw the video in an entirely different light: it made me laugh. Even thought I didn't necessarily WANT to laugh at the plight of the ducks, I do.  Why?

And that brings me to the question of why we laugh at anyone's misfortune, duck or human. We do it, all the time, but why?  Is it because in their folly we see our own?  Or is it because we're relieved that, this time at least, it's not happening to us?

Tell me your reaction to the video! Why do you think you had it?

Conspiracy Theory: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

By Robin Burcell

Leave a comment for Robin this weekend and you'll be entered in a drawing for a free copy of The Black List.

 I’ve always been a fan of conspiracy theory—the sort relating to Templar treasures, the Masons, and Washington, D.C. being run by a handful of millionaires. Not that I necessarily believe all of it, or even the vast majority.  But I do find it extremely entertaining as a form of fiction. The question is why? What makes it so interesting? Isn’t it just the ramblings of the paranoid? Or is there something more to it? Something real, tangible?

More than likely, it is a little of both.

I think my fascination with conspiracy theory started with the movie by the same name starring Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts, as well as Enemy of the State, starring Will Smith and Gene Hackman. Both movies are about ordinary people going about their ordinary lives, then suddenly falling prey to some governmental plot to eliminate them because they had accidentally and unknowingly witnessed something or found something that could possibly blow the lid off a major government scandal.

Conspiracy theory has been around for a long, long time. Historians battle it, news stations love it. The higher profile the event, the more likely it is that conspiracy theorists will have placed the blame on the government or that cabal of millionaires (some who are politicians, I’m sure) trying to rule the world.

Who wants to believe that one lone man is insane enough to take a life or dozens of lives, or even hundreds of lives? How can anyone be that deranged? How could we possibly walk outside? Or send our children out there? Because if it’s not some government plot, then it could be our next-door-neighbor, or the guy in line behind us at the grocery store, or sitting next to us on the subway.

We could be next.

Perhaps by believing in conspiracy theory, we take the Russian roulette element out of the horrible things that have happened in this world and we rationalize the evil by believing that since there really is a cabal out there plotting to overtake the world and that this is just part of their master plan, it’s not going to touch us. We didn’t see the secret documents, or learn the identity of the high-ranking person involved in an assassination who must remain unidentified. The recent killing/s was/were a cover up. Not random at all. The unexplainable can be explained and we can continue on with our lives and know that we will be safe.

I watched the film JFK the other night, about the conspiracy surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. By the film’s conclusion, I believed in the conspiracy, at least as it related to the film. I’m still not sure who was behind it, or exactly what the conspiracy was about beyond Cuba and the Bay of Pigs, maybe even the CIA (they always make good fictional bad guys), but definitely that a conspiracy existed, starting with the fact that there was more than one shooter.

What makes these conspiracy stories stand the test of time is that there’s a bit of truth in every one. And that’s what I do in my books. I make sure they include some historical facts, then tweak them so that my characters can investigate and uncover the actual reason as to why something did or did not happen. I try to include a Fact or Fiction at the end of each of my books detailing where the premises for the stories came from, and what is tweaked and what is true. Some of the real life conspiracies that I’ve used for inspiration are: BCCI, the bank used by the CIA for their black ops in Iran-Contra. It became BICTT in Face of a Killer. Propaganda Due (P2), the clandestine Italian Masonic lodge that nearly crippled the Italian government inspired my version, Ci-Tre (C3) in The Bone Chamber. Chimera viruses and profit-driven pharmaceutical companies were part of The Dark Hour, and charities fleecing the government to bring refugees into the country all to line their coffers were part of The Black List.

Naturally my intrepid FBI agents and covert agents from ATLAS investigate and restore order to the world. And isn’t that why we turn to fiction? We not only want to be entertained, but we want to have that hope and belief that someone out there is going to save us, whether it’s the FBI or another character. Maybe it gives us hope for the future. In real life, the more horrific the event, the more we need and search for that hope. Why then would we even consider conspiracy theory?

The answer is simple. It gives a rational explanation for the irrational.

 Leave a comment for Robin this weekend and you'll be entered in a drawing for a free copy of The Black List.
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Robin Burcell worked as a police officer, detective, hostage negotiator, and forensic artist, and is the author of 9 novels. The Black List is her latest international thriller about an FBI forensic artist. Visit her at www.RobinBurcell.com,  https://twitter.com/RobinBurcell, and http://www.facebook.com/robin.burcell

Famous Homes

by Sheila Connolly

New England is blessed with the surviving homes of many writers whose names we all recognize, and I've visited my share of them.  But sometimes I wonder, what do people do that?  What do visitors hope to find when they contemplate the desk where Louisa May Alcott penned Little Women in Orchard House in Concord, or the view from Emily Dickinson's window in Amherst?

I suppose one could argue that we learn something about social class for each of the writers, which in turn must inform their writing.  We know from other sources that Bronson Alcott, father of Louisa May, was, to put it kindly, an idealist but hardly a practical man, which left it to the rest of the family to make ends meet.  His wife turned to taking in laundry; his daughter to writing.  Dad must have recognized and taken pride in his daughter's literary achievements, if the Orchard House docent is to be believed:  he constructed an interesting built-in writing desk in Louisa May's room.  What's more, the writer based the house in Little Women on that house.

Visiting the house shows clearly how close to the other great minds of Concord the Alcotts lived—Ralph Waldo Emerson had a grand house just up the street, with Thoreau's cabin on Walden Pond not far away, and both Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne occupied the Manse near the famous bridge for a time, a mile or two in the opposite direction. The website for the Manse bills it as "the center of Concord’s political, literary, and social revolutions." Do you think some of the heady discussions that took place there soaked into the walls?

As a final note, the Alcotts, Hawthornes, Emersons and Thoreaus are all buried in close proximity to each other in nearby Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. People visit the graves and leave little gifts on the tombstones. Do you think the late literati commune from grave to grave?

The house Emily Dickinson occupied much of her life is clearly more upscale, and she had a pretty, pleasant bedroom with multiple windows upstairs facing the street.  However, the back of the house faces the cemetery where she was ultimately buried.

I will confess that my daughter and I made an odd pilgrimage to visit the houses where Sylvia Plath attempted suicide (the first time, unsuccessfully) and went on to write about it in The Bell Jar. It is only a few miles from the house where Pulitzer Prize winning poet Anne Sexton accomplished what Sylvia had failed to do.  Both are rather nondescript and forgettable modern homes.

I must say that visiting Mark Twain's house in Hartford, Connecticut, was eye-opening.  Twain married a woman with money, and the house they built in Hartford took every advantage of that (they hired Louis Comfort Tiffany's firm to decorate it).  If you're ever in the area, it is well worth seeing.  It is the most magnificent example of high Victorian interior decoration I have ever encountered—and they won't even let you take pictures.  I am still obsessing over one upholstered chair…

But what is most interesting is that Twain chose to write on the third floor, at the top of the house.  It's a large and comfortable space, but it is far less ornate than the rest of the house.  I would guess it was also more peaceful. That's where he wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Life on the Mississippi, The Prince and the Pauper and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and perhaps his most famous work, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

My own work environment is small and chaotic, between desperate spurts of sorting and filing the piles of paper I accumulate.  But I do find I like visual reminders of what I'm working on—pictures, maps and talismans that I hang on a corkboard in front of me. 

If you're a writer, what works best for you?

Rereading and the Status of Women

Elizabeth Zelvin

As a 21st-century American woman—ie, a woman with more choices and more freedom to determine my own destiny than in any other place or time in history—I have been reading or rereading novels about the women of different places and times with a certain compassion and sometimes horror at how constricted their lives were and how little power they had to make decisions about how and with whom they would spend their lives.

I’ll start with Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, admitting that in this case I didn’t read the book but saw the movie, which was visually lush and ought to win the Oscar for costume design.

In this 19th-century Sex and the City, the beautiful Anna has beautiful dresses galore and follows her impulse to jump into bed with the man who arouses her passion. But poor Anna! She “breaks the rules” (I’d love to know if that line from the movie appears in the novel; I suspect it’s an addition to make what happens more comprehensible to modern audiences) and is terribly, terribly punished. Her husband throws her out, her world shuns her, her lover loses interest, and she is left no recourse but to throw herself under a train. Vronsky, being a man, gets off scot free; the husband is widely considered a saint. Does Anna deserve her fate? Sure, she’s foolish and selfish. But her upbringing has taught her nothing but to live expensively, act shallowly, and marry the man she’s supposed to. What a nightmare!

Now let’s look at Jane Austen, whose books I know well.

I’ve recently reread all the major works, thanks to Kindle: Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Persuasion, Mansfield Park, and Northanger Abbey. All the novels are set in the world in which Austen herself existed. As a college English major (before the women’s movement, I might add, but with a sense of having the whole world before me), I took the premises of time and class in Austen’s novels for granted. But this time around, I was struck by how circumscribed, indeed, claustrophic, that world was for women of Austen’s class. Further, the fact that Austen lived her whole life in the same excruciating plight as her heroines struck me as unbearably poignant.

Imagine being born to a family of gentility—lots of social rules, limited society to interact with—but small fortune. As an unmarried daughter, you live at home. You owe endless “duty” to relatives and family dependents, no matter how silly, boring, or malicious they may happen to be. The only variety in your days is driving half a mile in the carriage for formal visits and the occasional dinner party to a set of people smaller than the number I can meet any day by simply going around the corner to the grocery store. For financial reasons, you must marry, but you meet a minuscule number of eligible men, unless your family can afford to take you to London for a “season” on the marriage mart—beyond the means of Austen families. While Austen allowed her heroines love and happy endings, reality more often consisted of an alliance with a man you might or might not be at all attracted to, who might or might not treat you well, and whom you hardly knew. Add to that the abysmal ignorance of unmarried women about sex. I’m sure many marriages consisted of a dreadful shock on the wedding night followed by anything from dreariness to nightmare, except for a few very lucky women.

And suppose, like Austen, you didn’t marry? She had her writing, you will say. Yes, but we all know how she had to write in secret, hiding her manuscript under the blotter when people came to call or family duty demanded her attention. No running out to Starbuck’s for a convivial latte to spur on the work. No DO NOT DISTURB sign on a closed door to repel distractions to the writer’s concentration. The skies would have fallen if Austen had treated her father or brother or even the housekeeper as I do my husband, who gets an urgent “GO AWAY!” if he tries to interrupt at the wrong moment.

Re-read Emma, and imagine yourself in Emma’s place. Yes, Emma is impatient, even cruel, to the boring Miss and Mrs. Davis, and she gets a thundering scold from Mr. Knightly for it. But would you elect a life in which you were forced to visit people you had so little interest in several times a week for life? And what about Emma’s father, with whom she does much better at kindness and solicitude? He’s a bundle of anxiety and hypochondria, must be endlessly reassured, and fails to supply a scrap of understanding or companionship. If she doesn’t manage to marry, she’ll be stuck with him for life. There aren’t a whole lot of people to love in Emma’s world, but she’s stuck with it, as Austen was with hers.

I had similar feelings on reading the novels of Anthony Trollope. I missed those earlier in my reading career (and missed them on television too), but was inspired by their availability on Kindle to try them. Writing fifty years after Austen, he still depicted a world in which women were under tremendous pressure to marry and completely dependent on father, husband, or another male relative for their economic needs. The choice of eligible husbands was still small, and the penalties for making the smallest mistake in social behavior or breaking of the boundaries of class were still severe. I could tolerate only a couple of them (Barchester Towers and The Eustace Diamonds) before deciding that the plight of women in these novels made them too painful to continue reading.

This is our planet on Facebook

by Sandra Parshall

If an alien civilization, trying to learn more about Earthlings, tapped into Facebook, what concept of our society would they take away from it?

They would have no way of knowing that even in an online community of almost a billion, humans seek out like-minded people and quickly form communities of “friends” so they can shun those with differing viewpoints and interests. 

Perusing one person’s timeline, for example, our alien peeping toms might conclude that virtually every human is currently producing, in a torturous manner, something called a book. And that a certain Robert Walker has produced more books than any other person on the planet.

Looking elsewhere, they might learn that the right to own an assault weapon capable of killing dozens of living beings in seconds is the single most urgent issue facing the United States, surpassing by a long stretch such minor concerns as war, climate change, and a struggling economy.

However, the most glaringly obvious fact they would learn is that humans are obsessed with other species and go so far as to share their homes with them.

They may find many mentions of “endangered” species, but will conclude from photographic evidence that Earth is overrun with black and white bears, to the point that every human possesses one. 

They might assume that this is the most beloved individual animal in the world:

But not all of its kind – called “cats” – are treasured. Indeed, it seems that the greatest threat to Earth’s delicate ecological balance is not climate change or pollution or habitat destruction, but this vicious creature -- the reviled "outdoor cat."

Further clouding the picture where cats are concerned: Despite the outdoor cat's malicious nature, gentle animals called “dogs” apparently worship any cat they can get their paws on.

 

By the end of a single day, those curious aliens would also know the details of thousands upon thousands of meals consumed by humans in the past few hours, most of them containing a substance known as chocolate. And if we don’t tone it down a little, they might decide to come on over and try this magical nutrient themselves.

 

So be careful what you post. You can’t be sure who’s out there reading it and using your whims and quirks to make a decision to invade or avoid us.

Retcon

Sharon Wildwind

We’ve had the Lord of the Rings prequel; a Star Trek reboot; Dallas: The Next Generation; and so many Sherlock Holmes wiggle-woggles I’d need a data base to keep them straight.

Movies and television are deep in retcon territory. Even though the word has been around for about twenty years, I heard it the first time last week.

Retcon (noun or verb): to retrospectively revise a work of fiction so that plot shifts dramatically, inconsistencies make sense, or a new world interpretation is created. It often upset fans/readers, causing them to take side or concoct elaborate explanations that cement their world back together. The original term was retroactive continuity, shortened to retcon.

The grandaddy of all retcons is, “Then I woke up and it was all a dream,” for which the Grand Chutzpah Award goes to Lorimar Television, which turned the entire ninth season of Dallas (the original one) into Pam Ewing’s dream. Everyone went back to where they had been at the end of season eight and started season ten.

Sometimes retcons were attempts to revive sagging story arcs. Two early TV shows, Maverick and Bonanza, played around with unexpected relatives. A third Maverick brother and a cousin showed up out of the blue. Little Joe Cartwright found out unexpectedly that he had a maternal half-brother. Neither of these surprise family extensions worked as well as the producers had hoped.

Television and movie retcons were often more about labor disputes than story line. Richard Thomas decided to leave the Waltons in the late 1970s. Fortunately there was a war on at the time: not Viet Nam, World War II. John-Boy Walton was badly burned and in a coma. When the bandages came off after he recovered consciousness and had plastic surgery, Robert Wrightman played the character.

Crispin Glover and the Back to the Future production company couldn’t come to a contract agreement, so in Parts II and III, the part of George McFly, Marty’s father, was played by Jeffrey Weismann. In Part II, the company went to great lengths not to alert the audience that a change had been made. Weismann wore prosthetic makeup and appeared only upside down, explained by a complicated plot where he had back trouble for which the treatment in 2015 was to be suspended upside down in an anti-gravity harness.

Glover sued, contending that his likeness had been used without permission. The Screen Actors Guild revised its collective bargaining agreement to prohibit producers and actors from reproducing an actor’s likeness.

In no particular order, here are some well-used retcons:

• Illegitimate child or unknown twin: relatives characters never knew they had show up to complicate their lives
• Never-recovered body: bet your boots the guy or gal is still alive and will eventually reappear
• Misidentified body: ditto eventual reappearance
• Error in medical diagnosis: a character comes to grips with dying, only to be told he is perfectly healthy
• False arrest and imprisonment: takes a character neatly out of the way, but if the actor wants to sign a new contract after all, there’s a convenient release and pardon once the true perpetrator is known

Here’s my question: is a retcon playing fair with the viewer/reader?

Quote for the week

All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas!

~ Thomas Edward Lawrence, (1888–1935), British Army officer, archeologist, and author