“Did you know there are more people with genius IQ’s living in China than there are people of any kind living in the United States?”

So begins Aaron Sorkin’s brilliant script for “The Social Network,” the best movie of 2010 and one of those films we’re going to look back at and realize was one of the greats. I enjoyed “The King’s Speech” and have had a crush on Colin Firth ever since he looked down his beautiful nose at poor Elizabeth Bennett at the ball. But something quite special is happening in Sorkin’s script and if I can’t put my finger on it exactly, I feel it and hear it.

I’ve seen the film three times so far. The first time, I was simply blown away, left the theater stammering my amazement at the force of the film’s idea and the intensity of the collisions, and the beauty of the dialogue. The second time, I listened for what had struck me and realized that the pauses – the beats between the sounds -  in the dialogue were as important to the story as they are in a poem or a string quartet. The third time, I tried to ignore Jesse Eisenberg’s mesmerizing mouth, the canny little turn-up of the lip that passed for a smile, and the quick squeezing of the mouth that signaled massive annoyance with the people his fictional Zuckerberg deemed unworthy of his full attention (almost everyone) and listen to the actual music. It works. It’s almost like another kind of dialogue. Think about Zuckerberg’s awkward, lonely nighttime jog home through Harvard’s campus after Erika has dumped him. The music is his mind, buzzing, an internal monologue about what he can do to get back at her, the prologue to his response, which he only safely speak to the computer: “Erica Albright’s a bitch. Do you think that’s because her family changed their name from Albrecht or do you think because all B.U. girls are bitches?”

The cast is so good, the actors so committed to their characters, and Sorkin’s words for them so specific to each that the film hums. The story is about smart, young people and they talk like the smart, young people I know, idealistically at length, or sparingly, almost as if they’re texting. The central character is almost autistic in his isolation from his peers most of the time. He doesn’t communicate well (see above) and yet he has to be the  beating heart around which a handful of young people will gather, fly apart, hurt each other, and learn hard lessons about life, all while he sits in front of a computer or at a table, staring at his grand idea coming to life. Staring at his life, actually.

For a writer, this is a script to study, to take apart, to dig into, but then to skate along the surface of, to let wash over you and then to gobble up.  I’m not a screenwriter but that hardly matters. Good writing is good writing, so matter in what form you find it.

“It is completely unimportant. That is why it is so interesting.”

-       Hercules Poirot, in Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)

Clues, clues, clues. Creating devilish ones, planting them unobtrusively, distracting the reader with showy ones that turn out to be not at all what they seem. It’s so much fun to read them in stories by masters of crime fiction, and so hard to do oneself. After all, if you created it, it screams out to you. How could anyone else fail to pick it up immediately?

That’s why it’s a high-five moment when a reader emails me to say she had no idea who the villain was in MURDER IN THE ABSTRACT until I revealed it. And that’s why I’m squirming in my chair this week as I work through a particularly tricky moment in my new mystery in which I have to lay a false trail at the same time I sneak in a couple of genuine tips that must seem unimportant, as the little Belgian detective says, his moustache twitching, for another ten chapters.

A lot of crime fiction doesn’t rely on mystery. In thrillers, you frequently know who the bad guy is on page one. The tension comes from not knowing if he’ll be caught before he kills again. In police procedurals, the cops may not know who the murderer is, but they assemble their clues in front of you, for the most part. The challenge often is for you to put the puzzle pieces together as well as the professionals do, or to fret that they’re not seeing the picture correctly, and that the killer will strike again before the analyses – or the cop’s hunches – pay off.

I lost interest in Nancy Drew early on (too goody-goody), but gobbled Agatha Christie’s devilishly clever mysteries when I was a young teenager, and still own and reread many of them just to marvel at her powers of distraction. As a young mother with time on her hands and an unhealthy threshold for boredom, I dove into Nero Wolfe’s world, as created by Rex Stout and narrated by Archie Goodwin. I think my taste for clue-driven crime fiction took hold in those days and is probably why I have chosen to write in that vein now. I love and admire the work of authors who write other forms of crime fiction, but the planting of clues deliberately designed to lead the reader astray is my first love.

Okay, it’s only 300 words, 350 max. I can do this.

I’m on a tear with a new Dani manuscript, this one set on a college campus in New England. I’m writing 1,000 to 1,500 words a day, with the goal of adding 20,000 words to the existing manuscript by the end of the month. Let’s see, today’s the 16^th, which means I have basically 15 days (not quite that if I give myself one weekend day off each week) to write the remaining 15,000. The math’s easy. I can do this. The 350 words? That’s for this blog post. (100 so far).

Am I crazy? Am I obsessing about the words and forgetting their meaning? Is writing to a word count a shallow, empty exercise for a writer, even one who makes no claim to be writing the next great American novel? Am I the only writer who gets distracted by word counts when she ought to be probing the motives of the man in black seen lurching away from the scene of the crime on a dark and stormy night? (182 – I’m more than halfway there.)

My first book took years to write. I had no agent, no publisher, and absolutely no sense of what a luxury it was to keep fiddling with paragraphs, scenes, chapters. My second took two years from concept to delivery and I felt quite proud until several authors casually mentioned they did the same in seven to nine months. Yeesh. (247 including the “yeesh.” It’s all gravy now.)

This time, I made a rash promise to my agent and to myself to deliver the next manuscript in ten months and that’s when I got into trouble, into Word Count Hell. My consolation is it’s the first draft. I finish and then the real fun begins. My writing group gets first crack, then I re-write, killing many of the darling words, and then submit it to and take notes from my smart agent. That is, if I don’t turn into a blithering idiot before then, wandering down the halls, counting, counting, counting… (348 – over and out.)

More than 450 authors, aspiring authors, blog reviewers, readers and fans congregated in Santa Fe New Mexico for the annual Left Coast Crime event March 24-27. There were panel discussions, new author introductions, book signings, banquets, and myriad other ways to meet new people or plug into one’s network. There was also one of the loveliest cities to explore, chile-laden Southwestern cuisine to sample, and some of the most dramatic geology on the continent to hike and photograph. It was a great party and a nourishing experience. As an author whose first novel debuted last year, I relished the fact that I already knew so many authors and that strangers would now and then come up to me to ask for my signature and tell me they enjoyed my book. I’m honored beyond saying.

Two things stood out for me:

What readers/fans and writers want from panel discussions is different. Readers want, naturally, to meet and schmooze with the authors they admire. Writers want to polish their skills. LCC isn’t a writers’ conference, although it may be a publishing/marketing one. With publishers spending less and less promoting books they don’t think will be best sellers, but continuing to make contract decisions based on numbers of books sold, the pressure on authors to come up with new and affordable ways of promoting sales of their books keeps increasing.

The e-revolution is the big news everywhere. No matter what the initial topic was, it seemed that almost every conversation, in a conference room or at the bar, veered in that direction. Truth is, no one knows how this will turn out, but everyone realizes this horse – non-paper publishing and purchasing – has left the barn. Will our publishers figure out how to respond in ways that don’t (further) impoverish authors and bookstores? Are publishers themselves right in fearing they’ll be cut from the herd as authors go directly to Amazon? Will quality drop like a stone without the agents and editors to act as gatekeepers between writers of all skill level and the reading public? Where’s the money and who gets it?

Last, shout outs to a few people at LCC: My beautiful and talented agent, Kimberley Cameron; deservedly popular author Rhys Bowen, who is always gracious and accessible; conference chair Pari Noskin Taitchert and her committee; blog reviewer Lesa Holstine, who took great photos; and my fellow LadyKillers bloggers, who were present and accounted for lots of the liveliest panels during the conference.