I will admit it right here and now—I am addicted to mystery TV. This is a genetic condition. My mother—a longtime TV mystery addict—introduced me to Perry Mason reruns as a child. She now subscribes to TWO special cable TV channels. One features mystery TV shows from around the world. She is always chatting about this intriguing Dutch detective, that handsome Italian detective or an exciting German mystery. Unlike any other genre, I can binge (or gorge) or simply have old episodes of ‘Criminal Minds’ ‘CSI’ ‘Midsomer Mystery’ ‘Law and Order’ etc. humming in the background, like a deadly soundtrack
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Reading OUTSIDE Your Genre
I find that writing outside my usual genre is a fantastic educational exercise, but reading outside my mystery genre is essential. It’s not a choice. It is a necessity. I read historical fiction, thrillers, horror, romantic suspense, literary fiction, fantasy, science fiction, non-fiction, history, biography, poetry, and everything/anything else. I’ve discovered that simply reading OUTSIDE my comfort zone, improves the writing I do within it. Why is this so? I can only guess that it’s the experience of unchartered, unfamiliar territory that expands my palette of literary colors. The use of language varies from genre-to-genre, the pacing of stories, and
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Temporal Ellipsis
One summer when I was still in college, I took a class on screenwriting in the film school at NYU. I learned a great deal—most of all I learned that screenplays are not a natural storytelling format for me. I’ve tried a few times since then and will likely try again, but I would rather infuse the visual narrative and scene-by-scene progression of a screenplay into my short stories & novels. One thing that fascinated me then—and continues to intrigue me—is the idea of a temporal ellipsis. The usual dictionary definition of an ellipsis is: the omission from speech or
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Haunted Hospital
It’s easy to see why so many sagas (in books, movies and most of all on TV) are set in hospitals. The wild mix of stock characters—from attractive, young residents, sage attending physicians, and wise cracking nurses & orderlies, to drug or sex-addicted specialists, narcissistic surgeons, and kindly, old administrators covering gambling debts with theft—combined with life & death dramatic decisions and the ethical quandaries posed by modern medicine, make for a setting ripe with story potential. But what about when the hospital is the patient near death? The institution about to close, with emptying hallways, staff running off to
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Based on a True Story
The phrase ‘based on a true story’ is marketing catnip, but it also presents special challenges to writers. People often tell me stories from real life that I ponder and re-mix into starting points for fiction. Once is a while, someone will tell me a story and make me promise NOT to use it. This doesn’t happen often and I warn friends that I’m a story vampire and may not be able to resist the lure of good premise. Last week a good friend related a true story that I can only describe as magical in its combination of coincidence
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Pet Names
Smitty the Kitty, Schimellpenick, Lady Jane Grey, Calypso, Merlin and Chief Inspector Morse…Yes, those are names of the CATS that have scampered, snuggled, and purred into and through my life. I am responsible for the names of the last four. Deciding on the name of a cat, dog, snake, etc. is an interesting process. It reveals a great deal about a person—or a character in fiction. I just read a historical mystery and the detective has a black cat named Thunder. It’s a cool name for an indoor/outdoor hunter with a sense of entitlement and a favorite spot by the
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Weak Words
One of my all-time favorite bloggers—Jeri Walker—explored “Weak Words” in a recent post on her Word Bank blog. This post inspired me to strip away all sorts of unnecessary adverbs and to transform ordinary words into stronger more specific descriptors. ‘Rapid’ is so much faster than the weaker ‘very fast.’ Isn’t it? When you review text with this focused mission in mind, all sorts of things happen. First, the text gets tighter. Then the dialog gets punchier. And finally, you start to find the weak and redundant language that weighs readers down. A few days after I read Jeri’s post,
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Happily Ever After?
Perhaps the only thing in fiction more appealing than a hopeless, dystopian disaster is a happy ending. The kind of ending that wraps up all the loose ends and satisfies even the most obsessive of readers. Last week I pondered the appeal of apocalyptic dystopia; today it’s time to take a hard look at ‘happily ever after’ and why it never seems to grow old. Admit it, you feel good when a Jane Austen novel ends with a wedding. Through the trials and tribulations, knowing that the young lady protagonists will find love, satisfy their parents’ ambitions, and fulfill their
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Apocalyptic Appeal
Every day another apocalyptic scenario! And I’m not talking about the news—I’m talking about our collective desire to imagine the end of the world as we know it—in fiction. Sometimes I wonder how the steady trickle of dystopian novels (short stories, movies, etc.) became a flood and then a tsunami of disasters. I grew up with dystopian classics—‘Brave New World’ by Aldus Huxley, ‘1984’ by George Orwell, ‘Fahrenheit 451’ by Ray Bradbury, ‘The Time Machine’ by H.G. Wells… By the time I read ‘A Canticle for Leibowitz’ by Walter M. Miller Jr. and ‘The Children of Men’ by P.D. James,
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