I just returned from three glorious weeks in Kauai, where I gazed from the ocean to the mountains, from blue waters to lush green foliage and flowering trees and generally lost myself in the natural splendor. My every-other-Tuesday LadyKillers blog assignment was waiting when I got home. The topic: composting. I wrote this, and am adapting it here in case you don’t follow The LadyKillers (http://www.theladykillers.typepad.com/).

As beautiful as the retreat was, it wasn’t planned as an escape from writing. I was adding lots of words, some good scenes, danger for my protagonist to deal with, and mysterious behavior by other characters. But in total, it wasn’t going anywhere. Ups and downs in the action and tension, but kind of circular.

Wondering where to aim my plot, I got out the original one-page outline for this new Dani O’Rourke mystery, the ‘what happens to whom and why’ that had excited me in the first place, and realized I had let my characters pull me off the path. It’s fine to see where characters will lead you to a certain extent, but in conversation Sunday night at one of Janet Rudolph’s delightful author evenings, Craig Johnson confirmed what I had realized on the lanai in Hanalei: you can’t let your characters off the leash for too long. I had gotten lazy and was simply following mine around.

So, sitting there one afternoon as warm, torrential rains fell, I did the kind of cutting and pasting a computer allows you to do, re-shaping what I had that fit into my outline, and setting other parts aside to break down into smaller parts I could use, or to become part of the background landscape of my series, maybe never to find their way into print, but nourishing a richer understanding of how Dani, Dickie, Charlie “Green Eyes,” Suzy, and Fever the cat operate in their world.

In a word, what I did was to compost some of my manuscript!

Writing Rules to Ignore #4: Start your crime fiction with a bang

The current thinking is readers need to be grabbed in the first page – no, the first paragraph – no, the first sentence. If your story doesn’t begin in such a compelling way that they have to keep reading, you are doomed.

Doomed, for one reason, because editors at publishing houses have the same attention span that readers do. But also because in this age of instant gratification, constant distraction, short form communications, and time pressures, consumers of books need to know you’ll whip them in and out of your story fast. Efficiency, organization, clarity, and main-lined thrills sell books at airport kiosks, which is where the new readers pick up their fiction while skimming along moving sidewalks between planes.

And then comes The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. By my count, nothing – nothing – happens until page 135 in the edition I read. How many copies has that sold so far? Did the writer not get the message? Is it possible he ignored the rule and just started writing his story, with all that background and setting of scene, and showing us a handful of people slowly moving to the center of a story that would eventually capture millions of readers for several years?

It is true that a story that begins badly, with graceless writing and no tension or conflict, isn’t likely to get better. The novel has to be excellent from the first sentence on to be worth $27.95 or $7.99, (or 99 cents on Kindle). But since when is good writing synonymous with finding dead bodies on the stairs in the first paragraph?

But we poor authors want our books to be read, and the marketing and sales staffs at publishing houses need to sell our books at the airport kiosks, and the sociologists tell us the world is spinning faster and faster and taking all our leisure habits with it.

This doesn’t mean you can’t ignore the rule, but you’d better have an ace up your sleeve, something with which to seduce that speed reader to stay with you as you unfold your tale.

Writing Rule to Ignore #3: Never kill a cat

This is a standing joke, among crime writers at least. The thinking goes that the reader will be yanked out of the story, transfer all his sympathies to the animal, and write you a nasty letter asking what you have against cats, or dogs, or hamsters, or whatever cute thing you submitted to the axe or the gun.

I once started a short story for a themed competition. Without planning it, I found myself having the suspicious character kill one of his wife’s dogs outside her front door. She could hear the horrible act happening but not see it through the locked door. I wanted to create terror for her and make this guy such a horrible specimen that the reader would be on the wife’s side when she took her revenge. But the scene creeped me out even before I got to the end, and I felt like washing my brain out with soap for even imagining such a heinous act.

Odd, isn’t it? We write (and read) crime fiction in which people are murdered left and right, often in gruesome ways. But we’re squeamish about killing animals. I’m not a psychiatrist so I have no explanations.

I do think the rule can be ignored as long as the writer knows the immensity of the effect and uses it to make a huge emotional impact. The Godfather anyone? The horse’s head under the covers?

Writing Rule to Ignore #2: Avoid adverbs

David Hewson, the British thriller writer, once told a group of writing students that he didn’t understand why American authors and writing teachers were so set against the use of adverbs. He said that British writers didn’t get so uptight about it, that if it was called for, they didn’t try to write around it.

“Is that a gun?” she said, her voice small and wobbly.

“Is that a gun?” she said, a sob in her throat, which was almost closed with fear.

“Is that a gun?” she breathed.

“Is that a gun?” she said breathlessly.

There are times when each of these might be the right choice. I agree that the rule exists for a reason. The writer who uses an adverb with every verb is obvious, and boring. He’s also lazy. It shouldn’t be necessary to tell the reader what’s happening.

The door closed loudly.

The sedan’s brakes squealed noisily.

The redhead grinned shamelessly.

The stronger writer shows the reader through precisely imagined action sequences and specific, distinctive dialogue. In theory, if we’re doing it right, the reader knows by the time he comes to that place that the door would be slammed because the character going through it is mad as hell and doesn’t need to worry that someone with a gun is listening for signs of movement in the building.

Writer and teacher Peggy Lucke recently noted that one exception to the rule is when what is being said contrasts sharply with the meaning expressed in the tone of voice.

“Go to hell,” she said sweetly.

I think the real rule is never rely on one way of communicating your story. Variety, surprise, conflict, tension, humor – the best writers weave words into something that is so compelling that we readers don’t notice things like parts of speech and word order.