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.

Writing Rule to Ignore #1: Don’t switch points of view (POV, in the trade) except between chapters.

Right now, I’m deep in the bowels of a mystery novel I’m working on, working to stay focused on getting to “The End” in a few weeks. As other writers will recognize, that’s precisely the time that my mind wanders to the other projects I’d much rather be writing. I’m holding them all at bay until I’ve conquered the muddles in this book, but I am letting myself think in odd moments about the ones I’d rather be writing.

It’s one of those that has me thinking about multiple points of view. The conventional wisdom is it’s too hard for readers to follow changes in whose perspectives they’re hearing. Best to stick with a protagonist, the character the reader has come to know, and whose reactions are at least somewhat predictable.

The problems with that are that telling a story in only one voice, or one voice for long, formally defined sections can hamper the telling, restrict the color, and make the whole thing too…well, predictable.

I just read and recommend a charming Jane Austen homage of a novel, The Three Weissmanns of Westport by Cathleen Schine, that cheerfully thumbs its nose at the POV rule much as Jane herself would have if it had been articulated in her day. Not only that, but the narrator comments throughout on the characters’ foibles. The author sometimes carries out this sleight of hand within a single sentence, as if the all-knowing storyteller was spinning around the room, reading minds, feeling reactions, overhearing murmurs, and passing them along to us so we’d have a deeply multi-dimensional and illuminating experience.

I didn’t get lost or confused for a minute. I, who grew up on Jane Austen and have a novel by Anthony Trollope on my desk right now, am wiggling in my chair with the need to try my hand at it for my next book.

Just finished a historical suspense novel that I paid full price for because the New York Times recommended it. I dragged myself through it (in part because it cost $25), refusing to quit until I found the key to its advance billing.

I never did, sorry to say. On reflection, there were several aspects of the book that didn’t work for me. They might please many – most, even – readers, as they did the book critic. But for me, they were impediments to enjoying the story.

First, too much history. Enough to set the scene is important, and enough to provide the context for the crime is critical. Why did the crime happen here? What about this place made the crime and the solving of it inevitable, shocking, unique? But that’s not to say I need to know everything about the place that the author found out. In this novel it got tedious, and drew me away from the mystery, not into it.

Second, too much place detail that only served to prove the writer had done full-out research left me thinking I didn’t need to travel every cobblestone of the town every time the protagonist left his room. Sketching the physical scene well brings the story to life, and I love it when an author does that for me. But the adroit writer picks and chooses which details will move the story forward, explain movement or mistakes, keep us deep inside the dream.

Third, the crime – the heart of the story. Yes, the writer kept me guessing about who killed innocent people, but not caring. There was almost a throwaway tone to the prose about the victims. I had the feeling they didn’t matter to the author, that they were merely there to engineer the plot, not to make readers aware of the injustice and the need for things to be made right. And, if the author didn’t care, why should I?

The reason I spent time thinking about the book as I put it on the “Not to Keep” shelf in my library is that these are common mistakes, traps into which I can fall as easily as anyone else writing crime fiction. I hope I will bring a critic’s eye back to my own manuscript and be quicker to see when I fall into these self-designed traps. That’s probably worth $25 right there!

Actually, it’s brown, but  I’ve carried a tiny, leather notebook for at least a decade. I have a stash of new inserts and when one is full I pull it out, date the cover, and thumb through it to remind myself of the contents.

• Notes on a lecture by Ray Kurzweil, creator of the concept of the Singularity, predicting computer technology in the coming 20 years: “self-replicating technologies,” the proliferation of malevolent software (and how to stop it), and other gems of futuristic vision.

• Notes from a February 2006 MWA meeting that included especially grisly information about bodies after death, example: cherry red skin color indicates carbon monoxide poisoning. (I’m leaving out the more graphic examples.)

• Quotes from what was obviously a stimulating lecture on the masks we wear in society by University of Chicago faculty member and author Wendy Doniger: “The reason I hate spending an evening with boring people is not that they bore me but that I bore me because of the mask I wear.” Good stuff for a writer of social satire.

• A drawing of a cool porch swing I saw in Bali and dreamed I might one day build for the porch of the house I might one day have…

• A raft of hastily written notes that helped solve a major plot problem in the book I was working on, which became MURDER IN THE ABSTRACT (2010)

Other notebooks have detailed descriptions of people I see in restaurants, tantalizing snatches of overheard conversation, hand drawn maps of streets I want to use as settings in books, and names of fascinating people I met, or books that someone recommended.

Do I use this stuff? Maybe not all of it, not directly, not so far. But some, definitely, and as for the rest, who knows when a character of mine might realize she’s put on a mask to hide something vital from someone else? And, because we can all dream, I might win the lottery, get that house with a porch someday, and need a swing!

(Post revised from December 2010 LadyKillers blog post.)

A couple of months ago, I was invited to be a guest blogger on the “crazyforbooks” site. Jennifer asked me how I went about writing my debut mystery. I thought I’d post a version here in case you missed it. If you’re a reader (bless you!), this is a glimpse behind the curtain. If you’re a writer, help yourself to the ideas other, generous authors shared with me. But remember: Every writer gets to set her or his own rules.

1. Write what you know unless you love, love, love research. I chose to put my protagonist in a professional setting I knew: fundraising for a non-profit organization. She works at the fictional Devor Museum, which bears a passing resemblance to two of San Francisco’s real museums of art and antiquities. Had I chosen to write a tale of 18^th century England, I would have had tons of work to do before I felt comfortable writing a single word, and I think I would have been nervous about getting something wrong.

2. Write what you love. There’s always a lot of talk about writing what’s selling, but as any agent, editor, or author will tell you, you’re just chasing trends that may shift quickly and leave you stranded. It’s also true that passion, curiosity, and delight show in writing. I wrote about the contemporary art world, which fascinates me, and about the intersecting social circles of people who have considerable wealth and those who want some of that treasure. I hope readers catch my enthusiasm and sense of humor about those dynamics.

3. Write every day – almost. Waiting for lightning to strike, as those of us on the LadyKillers blog have discussed, is a tricky and frustrating way to approach the craft. There’s no substitute for what someone called “butt in chair” every day, or at least on a frequent, regular, no-excuses schedule. I did what you’re never supposed to do – quit my day job – because I found I wasn’t able to develop a strong writing habit, given the demands of my job (which were a lot like Dani O’Rourke’s.) Finished the draft in five months.

4. Finish. It’s related to #3 but not quite the same thing. A successful author of a long-running series once told me, as I was complaining about my slow progress, to “just finish the book, Susan. Pretend there’s no back button on your keyboard.” What she meant was that we often spend too much time trying to perfect the first several chapters – rewriting, polishing – not realizing that our agent or editor may say, “the action that grabbed me starts in chapter three, so drop the first chapters.” The single most important thing you can do as a writer is finish the book! Plenty of time for tweaking later.

5. Celebrate. A few thousand words. Finishing the first draft or last. Finding an agent. Selling the book. Seeing it in print. I’d been told many times by fellow members of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime that this is as important as any rule related to being a writer. Wow- 75,000 words, a whole book! Break out the chocolate chip cookies! Finding the agent of my dreams – meet family for dinner at our favorite Chinese restaurant! After every pause to celebrate, I’m right back at the keyboard, polishing the next book in the series, remembering the happy times as a way to make it through revisions.