The Play’s the Thing to Catch the Conscience of the King

In Hamlet a theatrical interlude raises the specter of guilt and many storytellers have used similar plot devices to elicit a change of heart or spur a character to action. Of course this means the author must write the play, story, movie plot or other tale that gets a hold of the characters. There’s nothing like a character telling a ghost story in an old house on a stormy night, to get the plot going in a certain direction. I have no problem writing the story within the story — I’ve done it and it’s fun. THE MARY SHELLEY GAME
Read More

Outlines, Schematics, Sketches — Oh, My!

I can’t say that I’m a pure “pants-er”  — plotting as I go along “by the seat of my pants” — but I’m not a scrupulous outliner either. It’s not for lack of trying. I admire systematic authors with notes on bulletin boards, schematics, detailed timelines and colorful diagrams. I just can’t wrap my head around all those incredibly useful tools. In fact, each time I’ve tried one I discover that I’m spending more time working on the outline than I am on writing. Still, I’m not spontaneously spinning out a complex mystery story with misleading red herrings and subtle
Read More

Lies and Liars

I was sitting in the sauna at my health club on a Sunday morning when I overheard two women having a conversation. Although I wasn’t actively listening, it was impossible not to overhear as one of them described how an acquaintance over a period of many years talked about her husband and his day-to-day impact on her life. “She said that he loved sweets so she had to eat dessert too. It wasn’t fair for him to eat dessert without her and it was about indulging, so she could never get her weight down.” “Yes, so?” The second woman asked.
Read More

Pushing the Scary Envelope

What scares you? The repeating themes in Poe’s short stories show that he was fixated on the thought of death by lingering diseases — both his mother and his wife/cousin Virginia died of TB — and of being trapped in a confined space or buried alive. His stories take these realistic fears and ratchet up the tension with Gothic gloom and elegant language. Right now, anything you fear — snakes, drowning, fire, terrorism, homelessness, insects, an upside down mortgage, zombies, rats, flesh-eating bacteria… has already been the subject of a scary book and an even more graphic scary movie. The
Read More

Best Served Cold

Revenge is a great motivator for all sorts of nefarious schemes. It presupposes a protagonist capable of not only holding onto anger, but of channeling it into a time-delayed plan. Swift revenge feels wrong — it’s too reactive and is likely to be the kind of big, emotional, response that lands the revenge-er in as much trouble as the revenge-ee. The desire for revenge promotes active evil. An otherwise good character can become obsessed with redressing a wrong and once a revenge fantasy takes holds it is very difficult to shake. Revenge fantasies can also elicit sympathy. It’s hard to
Read More

The Silent Morning — a Mysterious Story…

I went to bed angry. I’d logged off in disgust after reading the agenda for the morning meeting. I just could not believe my boss. She must be completely socially and psychologically tone deaf. There was no other reason for setting an agenda that would start with a contentious item before our first cups of coffee had a chance to get cold. Since women were hired as ‘consensus managers’ she was obviously a throw back to the time when women in business aimed for a ‘male’ (AKA confrontational) approach. It was going to be a long day. I set the
Read More

Invisibility!

Giving a character a supernatural, or otherwise extraordinary, power is a classic. It’s used so often it’s a cliché set-up for a wide range of genre stories. There seems to be two basic “origins” of these powers. One, it came about naturally — Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse character is born with her mind-reading ability. Or, two, it’s a metamorphosis with a specific cause, like Spiderman’s spider bite. This can be an accidental transformation or an intentional change. I’d say that the most famous of the intentional variation is H.G. Wells’ “Invisible Man.” When I was researching candidates for additional novellas
Read More

Telling Ghost Stories

I recently reread one of the greatest literary ghost stories of all time — Henry James’ ‘Turn of the Screw.’ Like Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein,’ the James novella is part of a long tradition of sharing tales of hauntings.             I remember telling scary stories at slumber parties, around campfires and late at night in country houses. It’s fun and, at least in Mary Shelley’s case, it can be an inspiring literary exercise. Henry James story is a masterpiece of innuendo and suspicion. Are the ghosts real? Is the governess suffering from delusions, stimulated by a sublimated sexual awakening? Are the
Read More

Every Picture Tells More than One Story

It’s not unusual for me to be drawn across three galleries at the Met Museum when I spy a couple of Caravaggios in the distance. The Italian painter with a back-story worthy of an epic novel (including a murder, brawls and conflicts with patrons) created images with powerful narratives. In paintings like “The Denial of Saint Peter” (at the Met) the story told in the picture is well known. To his contemporary audience, the purpose of his paintings was to retell important tales that were very much a part of their culture and common knowledge: “David and Goliath”; “Judith Beheading
Read More

Suspicious Characters

Who is suspicious? The idea of suspicious characters is old — the stranger venturing into an isolated kingdom, the new resident in a small town, the individual that looks different or the person with unusual habits all become “suspicious characters.”             For most of history, just being different — wearing strange clothes or not participating in a community’s social life — could make anyone suspicious. To a great extent this is still true. People who are different are often suspected of crimes they didn’t commit.             The idea of suspicious characters comes up again and again in crime fiction —
Read More