The story is in the details – make them shine!

 The critique partners’ comments were unanimous: are all these details really necessary?

I admit, it surprised me. My writing has sometimes been described as “lean.” All I’d done in this chapter was get a secondary character in the room with the protagonist and generate some tension before sending them off to examine a crime scene. The details – a door, a kitchen table with the protagonist latest cooking project, a clothing change. Was that too much, especially for a mystery whose structure requires clues hidden in a morass of, well, details?

The question, I realized at last, was not so much that there were too many details but that the readers couldn’t grasp what was pertinent to the plot and what was disguise. What was needed for setting and character development and what was intended to lead readers astray.

And that all of those details must do not only their plot-centered jobs but be intriguing enough to let readers lose themselves in the story. To set them happily off after the red herrings but still allow them to say, “of course, that’s how it had to be!” at the final reveal.

This epiphany set me searching for what wiser heads have done with the issue of “details,” such as agent/author/instructor Donald Maass’s suggestions for world building: beyond science fiction and fantasy at last fall’s online Breakout Novel Intensive workshop.

“Whatever the setting, it’s a unique world,” Maass told his audience at the virtual workshop. “What is the biggest event in recent history that has affected everyone?. . . If set in a small town, who’s the mayor? Who’s the social arbiter? The secret force?”

See the details? Image: Myriams-Fotos from Pixabay  

And on character building, Maass asked such questions (among others) as: How old is the protagonist? Remember, we’re different in our twenties than in our forties! What characteristic clothes does the protagonist (or any character) wear. “I’ve read 40 pages of everybody’s stories,” Maass said, “and I have no idea how any of them dress!”

What does the character do for a living? What does she look like? What family does she have? Who are her friends? Does she have friends? What’s her favorite food? What does she read? Or does she read? What does she do for recreation? What does her home look like? Smell like? What would other characters say is her defining quality?

On plot development: What is the main character doing on the day the story starts?   What are the events that would be going on in the protagonist’s life even without the plot? What is a personal life problem that might usually be easy to fix, but in this case it’s not? Why doesn’t the usual solution work? What is a smaller problem, even a funny problem that could bedevil the protagonist?

See what’s going on here? Details – but not throwaway ones.

These are only a sampling of details from Maass’s workshop relevant to any story. Now, what about those elusive clues so essential to mysteries? For cozy mysteries like the one I’m currently writing, graphic violence is off the table. And with an amateur detective – again the staple of cozies – police aid is limited, even impossible. At most, she has a friend of a friend on the police force – possibly a family member. But even these probably don’t take her skills seriously.

Access to crime labs and major investigative tools is also limited in cozies. Take away DNA, fingerprints, any technology not readily available to civilians and what’s left are basically the eyes, ears, and other senses available to all of us. What does she see and hear? At this point, the character’s professional skills may come into play. If she’s a cook, what does she taste or smell?

If, as in another staple of cozies, the character has paranormal help, what does it consist of and how reliable is it? Not that she’s likely to mention this except to people she most trusts. But are they really trustworthy?

She also has her social contacts. Who can she talk to – or not? What does she know about the background, the loves and hates, fortunes and misfortunes of people in the setting? Fortunately for cozy mystery’s amateur detectives, she’s working in a limited setting with an equally limited number of suspects. It’s a village, a small town, a school, an island. Details, details, details!

Fortunately, she also has some technology. Contemporary cozies recognize the ubiquity of cell phones and computers, but the key to using these is often to make them unworkable.

“Where technology is not, is where the bodies are buried,” was a suggestion gleaned from Dallas mystery writer Kathleen Kent at the Roanoke Writers Conference, another virtual gem from 2020. (See “Conference-go-round: down & dirty crime writing” at this site.) However, please limit the number of times the character can let her cell phone battery die!

It’s been said both that the devil is in the details and that God is. Either way, it’s up to us not to neglect the importance of those dratted details.

***

Need more? Oh, yes! Check out another post, “What’s not to love about cozy mysteries?” also at this site. Of course, it’s chock full of details… Or check out the 2021 version of
BONI still virtual!

Conference-go-round: down & dirty crime writing

Image: Klaus Hausmann from Pixabay

I can’t think of a better way to say boo! to Halloween than with tips from Edgar Award-nominated author Kathleen Kent’s tips of crime writing, courtesy of this month’s Roanoke Writers Conference. After writing a New York Times bestselling historical novel (the equally scary topic of the Salem witch trials) and two more well-received historicals, a friend asked Kent to contribute a crime story for an anthology. She’d never written in that genre, but she told her virtual audience, “Like any good fiction writer, I said, sure.” 

 Kent expected the result, published in the volume, Dallas Noir, would be a one-off, but her agent liked her detective character and the “sort of sardonic tone” so much he asked her for a novel. The result was her Edgar Award-nominated detective story, The Dime, followed by its sequel, The Burn.

So, what does a writer of historical fiction have to say about writing crime fiction? Some things that are unique to crime fiction and others that are common to all fiction – but ramped up to the nth degree!

The difference in degree lies such elements as:

  Pacing 

 Degree of suspense

 Heightened crescendo of emotional tension 

 Narrative style 

 And, in the noir genre especially, location as an important character 

Pacing starts with what Kent termed a “bang out of the box” beginning in which characters given a mission “from the get-go. . . .The story should open with the main character standing at a precipice as something happens that interrupts their ordinary existence.”

She also recommends writing the story’s end toward the beginning of the process and rewriting the beginning if necessary when the manuscript feels finished. And then more rewriting as often as needed. “There is no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting!”

In the fast pacing necessary to crime fiction, sentences are often shorter, and words are more likely to be single-syllabled. A sentence may even be a single word. Kent used the term “scenus interruptus” to describe the cliffhangers than about at the end of shorter than usual scenes -- “flashcard scenes” -- and chapters designed to put readers psychologically off-balance.

Also, in crime fiction with contemporary settings, Kent noted, with perhaps a tip of the writerly hat to the late Elmore Leonard, “people often speak in shorter sentences.”

And although many writers have championed the use of suspense in fiction generally, the use of reshuffled timelines such as flashbacks and opened-ended results that characters are not aware of can be used to increase suspense exponentially. As can foreshadowing – what Kent termed, “giving away little Easter eggs to telegraph to readers that something is about to happen.”

Writers of crime and related fiction genres may also be familiar with the technique of perpetually heightening the stakes of the story, which also increases emotional tension. Ask, Kent said, “How is your character at odds with his/her world?” Then thwart that character repeatedly. “What’s interesting are the (story’s) roadblocks and how the character gets around them.”

And then there’s that narrative style. A lot of it has to do with the tips already mentioned, but given the abundance of historical mysteries and crime stories, even those set in other worlds, the style “has to be true to the time and place,” Kent said. She drew on her facility with historical writing to note, “if not using a contemporary setting, “read as much as you can from the era, especially first-person accounts – although don’t get side tracked with interesting facts. . . Imagine your plot as a train track, and the characters as the train.” This train-track metaphor also helps keep the pace going. Don’t let that train get sidetracked.

(She also drew laughs – from this viewer at least – with her attention to using language suited to the setting, including the use of period-appropriate curses.)

And then, ah, then, there was the setting – location, location, location! “The great crime writers have used cities, towns, and the countryside as a character by the way their characters respond to their settings. Do as much research as possible on the place at the time of the story.”

For researching older settings, she recommended old maps are the most helpful aids to visualizing.

Finally, she offered some general notes on crime fiction writing and resources:

 Technology (where it’s not, is where the bodies are buried.) 

 Truth is always stranger than fiction

 Talk to (retired) law enforcement officers, PI’s, Feds, etc.

 Cops & Writers (Facebook group)

 Writerswrite.com – with “50 Fabulous resources” for crime and mystery writing

 Newspapers. “Small town papers are the best (for) fantastic ideas for stories and character development.” 

Want more about crime, mystery and thriller writing? There’s still more to come from this month’s Bouchercon 2020 conference!

New Year's countdown of readers’ favs of 2018: day 1

What – 2018 is almost over? No worries – for this final week of the year, I’m rerunning a sample of readers’ (and my) favorite posts, starting with a post first published January 26, 2018.

*** 

There was a full house at Interabang Books this week as Dallas’s newest independent bookstore and the Writer’s League of Texas hosted a panel discussion about community building for writers. And we hadn’t even known there would be cupcakes! (Those arrived courtesy of irrepressible panel member, author and community organizer, Arianne “Tex” Thompson, decorated with the names and logos of local writers’ communities.)

No, we were there because, despite the Hemingwayesque stereotype of writers as antisocial loners – possibly hard drinking ones at that – the local authors on the panel –Thompson, Kathleen Kent, Melissa Lenhardt, and Blake Kimzey – extolled the necessity of connections.

“It is so important for every industry to own its issues,” Thompson said. “For football, it’s brain injury. For ballet dancers, it’s eating disorders. For us it’s –”

“Hemorrhoids,” an audience member shouted.

Well, at least anxiety, Thompson acknowledged, when the laughter had died down. “You writers, there’s something seriously wrong with you!” (More laughter, some slightly self-conscious.) “It’s important that we need a counterbalance to the word hamsters running around in our heads. You need a writing community if you’re going to stay healthy and stay in the game.”

l-r, Lenhardt, Kent, Kimzey

And that, if in more chaste language, was the tone of the discussion moderated by the League’s member services manager, Jordan Smith. 

“Why is it important for writers to be in a community?” Smith asked. “And how do you find a community?”

Kimzey agreed. Now a prolific short story author and founder/director of Writing Workshops Dallas, he confessed to starting his writing career as an alternative to his day job.

“I was nodding off in a cubicle 10 years ago,” the author of “a lot of vignettes,” but no completed stories until he found a creative writing workshop at Brookhaven Community College. 

“It was transforming for me. There I was, getting feedback for the first time.”

He and the other students – mostly college freshmen and sophomores years younger than he was – took a second course together because they formed such strong bonds. (Kimzie would even take the course a third time, and end with nine completed stories.) “Now I have my gang of four, all at different stages. It’s important to have a cohort.”

“I started by going to the DFW Writers Workshop,” Lenhardt said, where she was able to grow her Stillwater mystery series and award-winning historical novels. “They ‘got’ me in a way my family didn’t.”

The stay-at-home mom went to her first workshop meeting and thought, “Oh, my God, nobody asked about my kids.” It wasn’t that workshop members didn’t care about her kids, she said, but that her relationship with them was being built as a comrade, not on the family connections which had previously dominated her life.

Kent, on the other hand, already completed the manuscript that would become her New York Times bestseller, The Heretic’s Daughter, on her own. She has said in other contexts that she kept her writing a secret from almost everyone except her mother, fearing the eyeball rolls if she confessed to it, with another career and well into middle age. “I wish I’d had a group like that.”

Which doesn’t mean it’s ever too late to start, either with writing or finding a community.

“Unlike, for instance, downhill skiing, writing is something you can begin at 50,” she quipped.

Writers find our community – now what to do with it?

Last Friday’s post at this site reprised the discussion about the need for community among writers from a panel of North Texas authors. But panel members didn’t stop at convincing their audience at Interabang Books in Dallas that they needed a community. They offered suggestions on where to find those communities – and what to do after saying “I do” to them.

Internet searches will turn up possibilities such as the DFW Writers Workshop, whose alumni include panelists Melissa Lenhardt and Arianne “Tex” Thompson. And creative writing classes such as those that launched panelist Blake Kimzey’s career in short fiction. 

Lenhardt used community to hone her Stillwater mystery series and award-winning historical fiction series. Panelist Kathleen Kent, author of historical fiction and more recently, the Edgar-nominated crime novel, The Dime, has lent her aura to a number of literary venues. Kimzey even went from taking classes in creative writing to founding his own group of writing classes, Writing Workshops Dallas. 

But leave it to fantasy writer Tex Thompson to bring North Texas’ abundance of literary communities into a single tent. Well, nearly a single tent. At last count, WORD (Writers Organizations ‘Round Dallas) included at least 30 groups, many immortalized on the tray of cupcakes provided for the audience gathered at Interabang.

Lenhardt (l) and Kent

Like Lenhardt, Thompson initially discovered the DFW Writers Workshop, and through it discovered introductions to still more writing groups. 

“People would stand up and make announcements about other groups, and I started to wonder, how many (writing) groups are there?. . . People want that community, it’s scary to drive somewhere in the dark to an unknown organization,” Thompson said.

And to alleviate the “driving in the dark” fear, WORD last spring brought together more than 300 group members to sample what each has to offer. WORDfest – the 2.0 version – repeats this year, Saturday, March 24, on the Tarrant County College Northeast Campus in Hurst, Texas. 

In the meantime, all the discussion of “writing communities” at the Interabang meeting no doubt left some audience members uncertain exactly what those communities have to offer. And what might be expected of them if they join one. 

Will they get to – or have to – read their own writing out loud? (No small concern considering that writing is one of the most introspective of human activities.) Will they be expected to judge other people’s writings? (See above concern again.) And what are the rules, if any, for either of these?

The good news is, as Lenhardt said, the DFW Writers Workshop group she picked, “‘got’ me in a way my family didn’t.” 

Still, how does a newcomer, a writer in a group of writers, “know when to show your work to someone else?” discussion moderator Jordan Smith of the Writer's League of Texas asked.

“I don’t think anyone should show anybody your first draft,” Lenhardt said, “because it’s terrible! Send it as polished as you can. That’s basic courtesy.”

Except, of course, when that writing rule, like many others, needs to be broken. Which she confessed once to doing when hard-pressed by a deadline. Still, it’s an exception she tries to keep as exceptional as possible.

On the other hand, Kimzey noted that he had been forced to show first drafts when he first started attending creative writing classes. With no more than a set of story vignettes in hand, the pressure of completing complete narratives before showing them to readers would have felt overwhelming. “If I hadn’t been sharing my first drafts, I’d never have finished anything.”

Whether first draft or third – or later – panelists still emphasized the value of having more than one set of eyes on their work before attempting publication, or approaching literary agents.

“You’re so close to your work that you don’t even know your own soft spots,” Kimzey said. 

And speaking about feedback, “Do you have any tips for it?” Smith asked.

“When I accept another writer’s manuscript, I owe a responsibility for honesty, offering my advice and being open about it,” said Kent. “(But) more than anything else, I try to be kind. As you become comfortable in your writing, the dime will drop. . .” (pause for laughter) “. . . and something will resonate. I take everything seriously, but you are the final arbiter of your work.”

Thompson also came in on the side of kindness from one writer to another. When talking to another writer one on one, her first rule is to say, “Thank you for much for entrusting me with this.”

A statement soon followed by, “What are you excited about? (Because) if you can’t get excited about their work, you probably shouldn’t be critiquing.”

“How important is genre when showing someone your work?” Smith asked.

“DFWWW is all-genre, so anything goes,” Lenhardt said. “I have found that having a real breadth of experience is a help. Personally, I think the best thing about a feedback partner is that they’re a good writer.”

Once writers have found a community, and received their own help, what can they do to pay that support forward? Smith asked.

“Buy their books,” Kimzey said. “Send them a kind note. Tell them how much a book meant to you. If it’s a peer, read their work and give them honest feedback.”

And don’t underestimate the power of little things, Thompson said. “If you’re (socially) awkward, volunteer to put the chairs up after a meeting. People will love you!” 

What is a writing community and why be part of one?

There was a full house at Interabang Books this week as Dallas’s newest independent bookstore and the Writer’s League of Texas hosted a panel discussion about community building for writers. And we hadn’t even known there would be cupcakes! (Those arrived courtesy of irrepressible panel member, author and community organizer, Arianne “Tex” Thompson, decorated with the names and logos of local writers’ communities.)

No, we were there because, despite the Hemingwayesque stereotype of writers as antisocial loners – possibly hard drinking ones at that – the local authors on the panel –

l-r, Lenhardt, Kent, Kimzey

Thompson, Kathleen Kent, Melissa Lenhardt, and Blake Kimzey – extolled the necessity of connections.

“It is so important for every industry to own its issues,” Thompson said. “For football, it’s brain injury. For ballet dancers, it’s eating disorders. For us it’s –”

“Hemorrhoids,” an audience member shouted.

Well, at least anxiety, Thompson acknowledged, when the laughter had died down. “You writers, there’s something seriously wrong with you!” (More laughter, some slightly self-conscious.) “It’s important that we need a counterbalance to the word hamsters running around in our heads. You need a writing community if you’re going to stay healthy and stay in the game.”

And that, if in more chaste language, was the tone of the discussion, was the tone of the discussion moderated by the League’s member services manager, Jordan Smith. 

“Why is it important for writers to be in a community?” Smith asked. “And how do you find a community?”

Kimzey agreed. Now a prolific short story author and founder/director of Writing Workshops Dallas, he confessed to starting his writing career as an alternative to his day job.

“I was nodding off in a cubicle 10 years ago,” the author of “a lot of vignettes,” but no completed stories until he found a creative writing workshop at Brookhaven Community College. 

“It was transforming for me. There I was, getting feedback for the first time.”

He and the other students – mostly college freshmen and sophomores years younger than he was – took a second course together because they formed such strong bonds. (Kimzie would even take the course a third time, and end with nine completed stories.) “Now I have my gang of four, all at different stages. It’s important to have a cohort.”

“I started by going to the DFW Writers Workshop,” Lenhardt said, where she was able to grow her Stillwater mystery series and award winning historical novels. “They ‘got’ me in a way my family didn’t.”

The stay-at-home mom went to her first workshop meeting and thought, “Oh, my God, nobody asked about my kids.” It wasn’t that workshop members didn’t care about her kids, she said, but that her relationship with them was being built as a comrade, not on the family connections which had previously dominated her life.

Kent, on the other hand, already completed the manuscript that would become her New York Times bestseller, The Heretic’s Daughter, on her own. She has said in other contexts that she kept her writing a secret from almost everyone except her mother, fearing the eyeball rolls if she confessed to it, with another career and well into middle age. “I wish I’d had a group like that.”

Which doesn’t mean it’s ever too late to start, either with writing or finding a community.

“Unlike, for instance, downhill skiing, writing is something you can begin at 50,” she quipped.

(Next time – tune in for suggestions on where to find that community of fellow writers we dream about, and an intriguing offer from the ever-cheerful Tex Thompson.)

Women on writing: turning to crime for a fresh start

What in the world would make three law-abiding Texas women turn to crime – writing, that is, audiences at the 2017 Dallas Book Festival wanted to know about authors Kathleen Kent, Melissa Lenhardt, and Lisa Sandlin.

(l-r) Sandlin, Lenhardt & Kent

In two cases, crime writing was something of a second act. Dallasite Kent hit the New York Times bestseller list as a writer of historical fiction with her debut novel, The Heretic’s Daughter, a based-on-real-life narrative about the Salem witch trials, and followed it with more historical novels before making a sharp turn with her latest, The Dime, a contemporary mystery set in Texas. Sandlin made her mark as a writer of literary short fiction (In the River Province: Stories, and others), then made the jump to crime with The Do-Right. Anomalous Lenhardt alternates her own genre of “feminist Western” (the Sawbones series) with mysteries set in contemporary Texas (the Jack McBride mystery series).

But what, besides Texas settings and strong women characters, do the books of Kent, Lenhardt and Sandlin have in common? And why did the authors choose murder and mayhem to showcase their writing?

“All of us love strong women protagonists,” Kent said. And “crime gives you a chance to push people to their limits of depravity, but also to the limits of human courage.”

Also part of the why, for the two most literary members of this deadly trio, the answer was a challenge and an unexpected brush with the noir genre.

It started, Kent said, “with someone I know calling for Dallas authors to contribute to an anthology called Dallas Noir,” from Akashic Books, publisher of noir series set across the world, and featuring authors from each city or country.

Despite being steeped in the nefarious deeds of earlier centuries, Kent has never written contemporary mysteries, but asked if she could, “like any good fiction writer, I said yes.” Her agent pronounced her short story contribution, “Coincidences Can Kill You,” as potential for a novel, and the character of Brooklyn to Dallas detective Betty Rhyzyk was born.

As Kent credits her mother with remarking about an ancestor hanged as a witch in Salem, “There are no witches, only ferocious women.

“I’ve got the same story as Kathleen,” Beaumont, Texas, born Sandlin said: another call from Akhasic Books, this time widening its net for the whole state of Texas with Lone Star Noir.

“I thought I had to have a detective (so) I came up with a private investigator who was the opposite of Sam Spade.” She soon decided that the neophyte PI’s secretary, Delpha Wade, was the stronger character of the anthology story, “Phelan’s First Case,” “and that became the core of the book.” Who needs a detective when he’s got a tough but tender secretary who’s more than decoration, and just released from a long prison stretch for killing her rapist.

Along the way, Sandlin exercises her literary talents and quirky sense of humor for a decidedly un-Spadeish crime story. “I have a gunfight with no bullets, parrots and pirates, but not in the same scene,” as well as a victim whose family is holding his artificial leg hostage.

Lenhardt’s start in crime came from an inspiration as literary as either Kent or Sandlin – with a twist. A self-proclaimed “romantic at heart,” she began her first-published novel, Stillwater, “as a retelling of Jane Austen’s Persuasion,” until in walked agent Jack McBride. As a big city ex-FBI agent, McBride finds himself baffled in the small Texas town of Stillwater (which strangely resembles Lenhardt’s hometown of Winnsboro, Texas) until local Ellie Martin takes him under her wing, and into her bed.

Far from ending with a kiss and a fadeout, to Lenhardt’s mind, the conflict only starts once the relationship has begun, and continues with Jack and Ellie’s second fling at crime, The Fisher King.

And although Stillwater was her first book to be published, she had already written the first volume of her Western series, Sawbones, with two more historicals due out later this year. “But no, I’m not through with Jack McBride.”

(Next: writing craft, agent tips, and results of the dreaded gong show, from the upcoming DFW Writers Conference)

Review: Kent's latest heroine stomps Dallas bad guys

Review of: The Dime

Author: Kathleen Kent

Publisher: Mulholland Books

Source: Purchase, Barnes and Noble

Grade: A

It’s not every author whose first book out of the chute can score New York Times bestseller status, as Texan Kathleen Kent did with her fictionalized account of a distant ancestor hanged during the Salem witch trials. But after a string of award-winning books of historical fiction, Kent has turned to a modern version of her trademark “ferocious women” with her newest novel, The Dime, starring the police detective she first launched as the heroine of a short story in the crime anthology Dallas Noir – Detective Betty Rhyzyk.

Not sure how to pronounce her name? Just call her "Riz". 

She isn't thrilled to relocate from her home in Brooklyn to Dallas, Texas. But when her domestic partner Jackie returns to Big D to be near her aging mother, Betty’s not about to give up the love of her life by staying behind. She’s bested the toughest criminals and most sexist fellow police officers in New York. How much worse can Texas dish out?

Well, there’s the blatant bigotry over her sexual orientation, shared both by Jackie’s family members and the law enforcement officials of Betty’s new department. And the incessant heat, “a monster wrapped around my head, all bristling mirrored scales, sliding tongues of sweat into my ears and down my neck.” And the vicious turf battles between Mexican and biker drug cartels.  

Still it isn’t until one sunny Texas Sunday that things really fall apart. It starts when a perfectly ordinary drug stakeout goes south, leaving three dead, including another cop, and one of her own team wounded, a “bat-shit-weird sequence of connecting circumstances (that) oozes into the world seemingly from an alternative universe. . . so dangerous you don’t even want to think about it.”

Little does Betty know there’s far, far worse to come, as Kent takes her readers on a ride wilder than any bucking bull, following the trail of a gang of drug dealers who scatter the body parts of their murdered victims across the Lone Star State. Although Kent’s language is still as gorgeous as anything in her historical fiction, after The Dime, she makes every other mystery seem like a cozy.

Fortunately, Betty can call upon years of law enforcement experience in the Big Apple to call upon for help. Not to mention her ever-present medallion of St. Michael, patron saint of police, and the wisdom of her Uncle Benny, wise in the ways of “Reaping the Grim,” as he termed his exorcism of the angst and rage that can eat the souls of those who witness the effects of bloody violence in the course of their duties.

A Texas native who spent decades working in New York, Kent demonstrates her knowledge of both NYC and all things bizarrely Texan: living in the city that killed JFK. Or lining up for tacos at a gas station turned zoo.

But is it only in Rhyzyk’s universe that Civil War re-enactors battle drug dealers with 19^th-century muskets and cannon? Or that a professional rodeo rider turns cop. Or drug dealers quote scripture to justify murder and mayhem? It's all in a day's work for Detective Betty.

Kent's fast-paced writing reaches a climax satisfying enough for a stand-alone novel, including a delightful explanation of its title. Luckily for readers in love with Detective Betty, she leaves enough threads hanging to justify the hope we'll see more of her indomitable heroine.

Dallas Writer’s Garret back and better than ever

Thea Temple

Dallas literary institution, the Writer’s Garret, welcomed a standing-room crowd to its new quarters at Metropolitan Press, 1250 Majesty Dr., with an open house, readings, and discounts on new classes Saturday. A change in ownership of the building in the Lochwood neighborhood that the Garret had shared with the Lucky Dog bookstore last December, a move I announced in a December 8, 2016, post at this site, “The end is nigh – make way for the beginnings.”

John and Marquetta Tilton, owners of Lucky Dog and its sister store, Paperbacks Plus, had given the Garret a home since its inception in the mid-1990’s by Thea Temple and her late husband, former Texas poet laureate Jack Myers. The Tiltons were on hand Saturday to wish the Garret well in its new home. (Lucky Dog remains in business at the Lochwood address, as well as in Oak Cliff and – under the Paperbacks Plus name – in Mesquite.)

The Garret’s new space at Metropolitan Press includes office, reception, and supply space, as well as a common room where the open house was help, and other spaces shared with Metropolitan Press’s other tenants. In addition to printing services, Metropolitan Press provides office space for a number of nonprofit organizations, and a rotating gallery of work by local artists.

Thea Temple, now the Garret’s executive director, introduced a panel of writers – some fostered by the Garret – several of whom will be conducting classes this spring – beginning February 11 with a workshop on partner zines led by poet/zine maker Lisa Huffaker. (Registration for Huffaker’s workshop closes tomorrow, February 8. Cost is $45 for Garret members, $60 for nonmembers. See the Garret’s site for membership and registration.)

Although the Garret has a special place for poets (Although the Garret has a special place for poets (“Jack won my heart by reading poetry to me over the phone,” Temple said) its classes cover a number of other genres.

l-r, Randel, McCullagh, Young, Kent

Additional February classes/workshops for writers are “Poetic Imitation & Innovation,” February 13, led by poet/creative writing instructor Logen Cure; Storytelling for Nonprofits and Grant Writers, February 18, with Robin Myrick; and “The Elements of Creative Writing,” February 21, with Darcy Young.

Later this spring, editor/blogger/memoirist Melissa T. Schultz, teaches “Finding Your Voice,” March 4 and historical novelist Weina Dai Randel, (author of The Empress of Bright Moon and The Moon in the Palace) teaches “Strategies in Writing the First Ten Pages” April 30.

Other authors on the panel – fostered by the Garret and past or possible future instructors --- were book artist Kendra Greene, essayist/novelist Julianne McCullagh (The Narrow Gate), actor/playwright Erin Burdette, and New York Times bestselling novelist Kathleen Kent (The Heretic’s Daughter and others), reading from her latest novel, The Dime.

“I wrote three books of historical fiction that did very well,” Kent told the crowd, “so it made sense that I would jump off the tracks and write crime (in The Dime, based on a character she invented for a short story anthology.)”

Randel lauded Kent’s instruction in a previous class at the Garret, leading Temple to speculate that the group could lure her back for a repeat.

In addition to classes for writers, the Garret also offers programs for readers, adult learners, children and schools, and the community. See the site for complete information.

Wordcraft -- New genre for ‘ferocious’ women

What does a writer with three award winning historical novels do for her next project? If she’s Dallas writer Kathleen Kent the answer is: something completely different. She spoke this weekend to the Southwest Chapter of Mystery Writers of America to say she’s one of us, a crime writer.

Not that she doesn’t still love the historical fiction of her first two novels, The Heretic’s Daughter and The Traitor’s Wife. Telling a fictionalized version of several times great-grandmother, Martha Carrier, one of the women hanged as witches during the seventeenth century Salem witch trials, The Heretic’s Daughter became a New York Times bestseller. The Traitor’s Wife (first published in the U.S. as The Wolves of Andover) told the story of Martha Carrier’s husband, Thomas, rumored by family legend to be one of the executioners of King Charles I.

For her third book, Kent fast forwarded a couple of centuries, basing her most recent novel, The Outcasts, in post-Civil War Texas. “My dad used to say, out of earshot of my mother, of course, that all the witches were on my mother’s side of the family, but all the horse thieves were on his side,” Kent told her MWA audience.

Then, last fall, she got an assignment from a local editor she never expected. Would she like to write a crime story for an anthology set in the Dallas area? Why not? The result was her short story, “Coincidences Can Kill You,” starring Dallasite by way of Brooklyn detective Elizabeth Ryczek, aka, Detective Betty. Betty made her debut in the Akashic Books anthology Dallas Noir last October, alongside stories from such other Dallas writers as Matt Bondurant, Ben Fountain, David Haynes and Suzanne Frank.

“What do a Civil War general, an antique sword, and an AK-47 have in common?” Betty asks. “Nothing. Unless they all converge during one of my cases.”

At first glance, Betty couldn’t seem further removed from either the accused witch of The Heretic’s Daughter, or the unrepentant epileptic prostitute of The Outcasts. But Kent brought up another nugget of family history that links all the women. “When I asked if Martha Carrier was really a witch,” she was told, “‘there are no such things as witches, just ferocious women.’”

Then came another call. “My publisher, Little Brown, who published all three novels, said, we love Detective Betty. How about writing a full length novel about her?”

Following Betty’s appearance, Kent had returned to work on a sequel for The Outcasts. But given the research she’d already done on previous centuries’ crimes and legal processes, Kent felt able to tackle a case of merely modern detection.

Her biggest challenge had been finding the authentic tonality for each period. “I had to get my tonality, voice and pacing different. What remained the same in writing about all her ferocious women, Kent said, is the method of character development.

“To get me thinking out of the box right away, I set up a character with challenges, who are contrary to expectations, who have difficulties. It makes (the writer) draw on resources you didn‘t know you had. (And) the characters are developed not by what you say about them, but by what other characters say about them.”

Detective Betty’s novel is still untitled. For more about her progress, stay tuned to Kent’s website, www.kathleenkent.com/. Or hear her this Thursday, October 8, when she’ll discuss The Outcasts for Read Across McKinney. For tickets and additional information, see www.readacrossmckinney.org/.

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Last fall, Kent inaugurated Dallas Heritage Village/Dallas Historical Society’s Farina Lecture Series. The speaker for this year’s lecture is Victoria Wilcox, author of Southern Son: The Saga of Doc Holliday (Book Two). Doors open at the DHV, 1515 Harwood, at 6 p.m. October 21. Register for the free event through the events calendar at www.dallasheritagevillage.org/.

Wordcraft -- Kent’s new book and a new venue for authors

The Outcasts

by Kathleen Kent

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In the world of Dallas writer Kathleen Kent, the past is always present. She hit the New York Times bestseller lists with her first book, The Heretic’s Daughter, based on the historic trial and hanging for witchcraft of her several times great-grandmother, Martha Carrier, followed by its prequel, The Traitor’s Wife. Her latest tale, The Outcasts, forsakes seventeenth century Salem for nineteenth century Texas.

Despite Salem ancestry in her mother’s family, “My father was a Texan and I was raised in Texas,” Kent told her full house audience at Dallas Heritage Village last week to explain her storytelling leap from East Coast colonials to Texans. “My father would say that all the witches in the family came from my mother’s side, but all the horse thieves came from his side. “I think the closest thing we have to Greek mythology is the Western classic.”

She made the decision to set her book in 1870, during the Reconstruction period, “because what fascinates me is not no much what happens in a war, but what happens after a civil war. How do you recreate yourself?”

Naming fellow Texan Cormac McCarthy as an influence was enough to tell Kent’s listeners they wouldn’t get a story of gentleness and reconciliation in The Outcasts. The level of violence after the war, Kent said, led Reconstruction governor Edmund Davis to disband the Texas Rangers, which he considered too loyal to the fallen Confederacy and institute the new Texas State Police, “the first police force to hire men of color and men too young to have fought in the war.”

It was from among this younger generation of lawmen that she drew the character of Nate Cannon, assigned to track down murderer William McGill.

While Nate follows the outlaw, young Lucinda Carter flees a brothel in search of a new life, relief from her epileptic seizures, and the chests of gold rumored to have been hidden decades earlier by sometime pirate, sometime war hero, Jean Lafitte.

The challenge in researching historical fiction, Kent said, is “to imagine what life was like in another era.” For sources, she called on the help of local historians, one of whom introduced her to alligators during their searches for treasure sites, and old maps to document towns and landscapes that have often changed dramatically over the course of the centuries.

And of course, there were the guns. “You can’t have Texas history without guns,“ she said, but found it was one thing to use guns occasionally in hunting and “a different thing to live with guns day in and day out."

Despite the violence and gun play, “the book, at heart,” she said, “is a story about kinship, the kind we chose to make with other people.”

For more about Kent, her books and her research on outlaws and other scoundrels, see
www.kathleenkent.com/.

Kent’s appearance was as historic as her book. She was the first speaker of the newly-inaugurated Nancy Kay Farina Lecture Series sponsored by Dallas Heritage Village to honor the memory of the late Nancy Kay Farina. Find more information on DHV at www.dallasheritagevillage.org/.

(Next Monday, Wordcraft looks at nonfiction historical writing, as John Barry discusses the world’s most horrifying epidemic at the Literature + Medicine conference.)

Wordcraft -- Kent stays true to historical fiction

It’s always a pleasure to listen to Kathleen Kent, author of The Traitor’s Wife, the prequel to her bestselling novel The Heretic’s Daughter. She stopped by a Real Bookstore in Fairview last week to discuss her latest book -- and what she’s working on next.

I first heard her speak at the Dallas Writers Garret in early 2009, soon after the release of The Heretic’s Daughter. The hardback first edition with her autograph must have been printed before the novel hit the New York Times bestseller list, because there’s no cover blurb announcing its status.

Although The Traitor’s Wife was Ms. Kent’s first choice of a title for the prequel, it was initially published last fall as The Wolves of Andover. The title change occurred, she told her audience, because the publisher believed there were too many books already out with the word “wife” in their titles. The United Kingdom edition, however, retained the original title and its sales encouraged a recent trade paperback version in the U.S. with the restored title.

The Heretic’s Daughter tells the story of Martha Carrier, one of nineteen women and men hanged during the seventeenth century witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts. The tale of the hysteria that swept the colony had been told several times, but never from the standpoint of a family member of the accused, until Ms. Kent wrote her historical fiction based on reminiscences of her mother’s family -- a descendant of Martha Carrier.

If Martha’s story sounds stranger than fiction, that of her husband, Thomas Carrier, told in The Traitor’s Wife, is even more fantastic. Family tradition insists that he was one of the executioners of Charles I who escaped from the Tower of London to the American colonies to elude assassins sent by the dead king’s son, Charles II and marry Martha Allen, later to be accused of witchcraft.

Although Ms. Kent at first believed her family’s stories about Thomas Carrier -- that besides being a regicide, he was seven feet tall and lived to be 109 -- were exaggerated, research turned up justification for the claims. The story in The Traitor’s Wife, she said laughingly, “is based on fact and the rest is the product of my fevered imagination.”

She was amazed to find at a reunion of the Carrier family after publication of The Heretic’s Daughter, that “so many of them had heard the same stories about Thomas.”

The man also known as Thomas Morgan the Welshman entered the new world “with two known regicides -- two of the judges of Charles I. He was gossiped about. There were rumors that followed him all over New England.” Carrier’s height was also attested to by contemporary news accounts of his death that stated two coffins had to be fitted together to contain his body.

Are there more books about the Carrier family in the offing? Maybe, Ms. Kent said. Although she is currently writing a book dealing with the post-Civil War Reconstruction era in Texas, she is interested in the story of one of Martha Carrier’s nieces who was kidnapped by Indians during the colonial period. For more about Ms. Kent and her books, see www.kathleenkent.com/

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If you want to recite your own family’s stories with the art they deserve, check out the Youth Storytelling Festival this Saturday, November 5. Members of the Dallas Storytellers Guild last weekend assured the audience that the festival, with workshops and performances, isn’t just for kids. Registration starts at 9:30 a.m. at the Zula B. Wylie Public Library, 225 Cedar St., Cedar Hill, Texas. See
www.cedarhilllibrary.org or call 972-291-7323 ext. 1312.

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More interested in writing than speaking? Writer’s Digest editor Chuck Sambuchino teaches a one-day writing seminar, also November 5, at the Trinity Writers’ Workshop in Hurst, Texas. See www.trinitywritersworkshop.com for details.