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!

Wordcraft -- Rollins on thrillers, part II

Last Monday, bestseller writer James Rollins spent much of his discussion of thrillers last month’s DFW Writers’ Conference describing a story’s hero -- the protagonist. But as important as the hero, is his or her antithesis -- the antagonist, the “dark mirror” of the hero.

(Because of the limitations of the English language, from here on I’ll speak of the antagonist as male, although we can all name a dozen great female antagonists.)

There was weeping and gnashing of teeth among thriller writers, I’ve heard, when the Soviet Union imploded. Because a good antagonist -- a good villain -- is more valuable than rubies. Which is why alternative history writers resurrect Nazi German, the Soviet Union, even Genghis Khan. And why writers of serial suspense only kill their bad guy stand-ins, never the ultimate bad guy, who’s too valuable to waste.

“The creation of the antagonist is as important as the creation of the main character,” Rollins emphasized. In fact, the “antagonist must be smarter, more resourceful,” than the hero. Just as the protagonist is the hero of your story, the antagonist is the hero of his own story. He “should not be bad for the sake of being evil. The antagonist, in his own head, should have a reason for what he does.”

Shakespeare’s Iago says he’s bad because he wants to be? We don’t believe him for a minute -- obviously he’s lying. He’s bad because he’s consumed by jealousy. And how do you tell when a character, good or bad, is lying? Well -- are his lips are moving? We all lie, if only to ourselves.

See last week’s discussion of heroes, write them in reverse, and you’ve got your antagonist.

So now you’ve got your protagonist, your setting, your antagonist -- you’re finally ready to start your story. But where?

“With action,” Rollins says. “In the first sentence, you want to set up a question in the reader’s mind.” Introduce your main character as soon as you can, ideally on the first page.” (Just don’t use a hook so powerful you, as the writer, can’t live up to it.)
And give your protagonist a personal stake in the outcome. “Saving the world is great, but saving your teenage daughter is more personal,” Rollins said.

And while we’re talking about writing tools -- just what is the difference between surprise and suspense? Rollins looks to movies for an example. If two characters are in a restaurant talking about dessert and their table blows up, that’s a surprise. If instead, in the same scene, “you show that ticking time bomb” under the table, that’s suspense, because the readers/viewers now know something the characters don’t know. And worry about it.

And because suspense is holds more powerful interest for readers than surprise, he recommends seventy-five percent suspense to twenty-five percent surprise in a story. That way, not only characters but readers are shocked when the event happens.

(Next Monday -- It’s hard to imagine a writer better versed in either surprise or suspense than Cormac McCarthy, author of The Road and No Country for Old Men, among other books. Guest blogger Dallas-area writer Jim Dolan discusses the Gothic elements in McCarthy’s fiction.)