Noir fiction for the modern reader.

I’ve been lax for the last couple of weeks.  Well, not lax, really.  I went out on the road to play music (six dates in eight days), and even though I brought my laptop with me, it was all I could do to edit a few chapters of my latest novel.  The distractions and the travel were so intrusive, that the blogging just didn’t happen.  Plus I’ve had some upheavals here on the home front, so my apologies to those who think I’ve vanished.  I’m back.

I want to write about writers groups.  Critique groups, specifically.  I am a big believer in them.  And it doesn’t matter what kind of writers are in a particular critique group.  If you join, you will become a better writer.  That’s all there is to it.

There are very small critique groups, limiting their membership to maybe three or four people, and then the size escalates from there.  In the small groups, each member may get up and read, then listen to the criticism of his fellow members.  Or each member may distribute a copy of his read to the others who take it home, examine it, mark it up, then deliver their critiques at the next meeting.

In the larger groups, the piece is almost always read aloud by the writer to the other members, who then critique it on the spot.

I’m currently a member of four writers groups here in Las Vegas, two of which are critique groups. They are:  the local chapter of Sisters In Crime, the Las Vegas Writers Group, the Henderson Writers Group, and an as-yet unnamed crew.  The Henderson Writers Group (one of the critique outfits) usually attracts 20-30 people to each meeting.  The writers are a mixed bag, writing in all genres, published and unpublished.

These last few weeks, I’ve been reading a chapter a week of my latest novel to this group.  Prior to these reads, I had gone over that novel countless times, looking for ways to make it better, adding stuff here, deleting stuff there, moving other stuff around, fixing typos, and so on.  I thought it was pretty close to right when I brought chapter one in to read.

Well, the critiques I received were things which I hadn’t seen in all the times I’d been over that book, and you know what?  I never would’ve seen them. They were things that, for some reason, my brain was not geared toward spotting.  Some of these things were obvious to everyone but me, while some were extremely subtle…moving a phrase from the end of a paragraph to the beginning, for example.  Either way, they’d escaped my attention altogether.  That’s the beauty of these groups.  All those other eyes and ears, backed up by brains different from mine, can and will see stuff which I could never catch.

And it goes without saying (although I will say it) that my novel is much better because of the critiques I received from this group.

Memo to all writers, published and unpublished:  If you want to improve your WIP, and ultimately your writing itself, join a local writers group.  They’re everywhere! They’re everywhere!

A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story.  He will never forget the sweet poison of vanity in his blood and the belief that, if he succeeds in not letting anyone discover his lack of talent, the dream of literature will provide him with a roof over his head, a hot meal at the end of the day, and what he covets the most:  his name printed on a miserable piece of paper that surely will outlive him.  A writer is condemned to remember that moment, because from then on he is doomed, and his soul has a price.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon (The Angel’s Game)

A few months back, I wrote a blog here called “Publishing and the Record Business”, in which I went on about the similar problems the two industries are facing today. There’s been a lot of talk lately in the blogosphere about this topic, so I felt it worthwhile to revisit it.

The record business has been largely decentralized, thanks to the digital revolution. It’s now at the point where a completely unknown artist or band can record their own album in his own software-based home studio, promote and sell it on the internet (if it’s any good), book tour dates as a result of sales, get “airplay” on internet radio, and carve out a modest career for themselves. This is happening over and over again all around the world, as thousands upon thousands of artists who would’ve had no shot under the dominion of major record labels are now following their dream with some success. And record stores? A distant memory.

As you can clearly see, under this scenario, the record companies are completely circumvented. They’re left with the big, big super-artists, who are really just putting out one bloated same-ol’-same-ol’ album after another, trying to hang on to their security within the record-label plantation system. Even major artists have liberated themselves by deserting the record-company sinking ship and starting up their own internet-based operations.

This is the future of publishing.

We shouldn’t worry ourselves about 100,000 free downloads of a Dan Brown book as much as we should be welcoming the opportunity for more writers to be published and read. I mean, does anyone really think that the future of publishing lies within the corridors of Random House?

I think the future lies much more substantially in the den at my house.

And your house.

And the houses of thousands of writers whose work would otherwise never see the light of day because agents and big publishers are too busy having lunch with each other to pay attention to them. Well now, they’ve got an outlet. And the publishing business as we know it is going to be ground into dust, exactly as the major record labels and the old Hollywood movie studios were, unless they get on board.

Now, I know there are many out there (myself included, actually) who say, “Whoa! I will never stop buying real books with covers and binding and all that other good stuff!” Well, if the publishing business gets their act together, we may be able to avoid an all-digital future, but that’s a mighty big “if”. In the meantime, we have to quit whining and start planning.

There’s a brave new world coming. And it’s coming sooner than we think.

Not long ago, I spotted a blog which ruminated about politics and fiction-writing.  The question was whether or not an author’s personal political views belong in a novel.  The blogger, a successful published author, felt they should belong, that he shouldn’t be restrained from making his views known. He claimed to “lean left”, and said that as long as the story is compelling, the writing is good, and the characters breathe, well then, what’s the difference if a little politics gets thrown in?

Here’s what I see is the problem. Most people really don’t admit to the extremities of their own political views. Not that this author (or any other) could rightfully be called an “extremist”, but that someone who “leans” left is likely to be quite a bit farther to the left than the centerish word “lean” would imply. Ditto with those who “lean” right.

Not only that, but this author was basically saying that his writing is so good, he can get away with preaching politics and those readers who “lean right” will just have to sit there and take it. In fact, I think what they’ll take is a permanent vacation from the novel, and tell all their friends not to bother with it.

Lost: many readers just because an author couldn’t resist the opportunity to preach.

I also think that most people who “lean left” tend to regard anyone to the right of Olympia Snowe as a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Likewise, those who claim to only “lean right” quite likely believe that anyone to the left of Joe Lieberman is a communist radical. And neither one realizes how out-of-whack his/her perception really is.

It’s these kinds of misperceptions that can slice great chunks from an author’s readership, causing them to disappear into the mist, if he/she gets political. And like the author in the blog who thinks he’s being quite reasonable not only in his politics, but in his decision to trumpet them, he completely misunderstands the perceptions of his “right-leaning” readers, who will probably regard him as a disciple of Stalin. I also have the sneaky feeling that he would himself put down any book written by a proselytizing author who “leans right”.

Contrary to popular myth, we don’t really live in the Information Age. We live in the Perception-Of-Information Age, and we would all do well to beware its many pitfalls.

Today I saw an intriguing post by Russel D McLean on the Do Some Damage blogspot regarding the creation of characters.  Seems he’d written some PI short stories, which were published in national mystery magazines. Feeling he had something going with this character, he wrote a novel around him, which his agent promptly rejected, saying the character had too much backstory.

So Russel peeled away all the backstory, changed the character’s name, and took away his support network, including his one true love. This resulted in a much tougher, darker figure. Russel saw the humanity in this new character, he got into it, and presto! A novel, and probably a series, was born.

Like Russel, I’ve had characters spring from nothing more than whole cloth. The central character in my upcoming novel, The Take, was born one night in a New Orleans bar. I saw a guy who looked like a young Jack Palance sitting there with a gorgeous date. Overeager, he did everything to try to impress the girl–bought her expensive drinks, danced with her, etc–but all to no avail. She basically blew him off right to his face. The guy had “loser” written all over him. I remember wondering what his story was, what he did for a living, his background, and so on.

I wasn’t even writing at the time, but I never forgot that guy. So when I sat down to write The Take, he leapt to the front of my mind, and Eddie Ryan came to life. As every situation in the book arose, each time the stakes were raised on Eddie, I asked myself, “What would that guy in New Orleans do?”

One night, my girlfriend forced me to watch The Nanny From Hell on TV. Said nanny was up against a family with two girls and a boy, all between the ages of five and eight, with the boy being the oldest. The girls played horrendous tricks on him, blaming him for their own misdeeds, setting him up for punishment, and other awful things. The mother believed everything the girls said, and mercilessly chastised the boy every time, reducing him to a whimpering little blob, while the girls sat by, smiling wickedly. Watching this in disbelief, I thought to myself, “this is how a rapist-murderer is born”.

Next short story I wrote, I told the story of a guy who had these kinds of childhood experiences and grows up a psycho.

Another one of my novels was based on a friend of mine who was a best-selling author. He was very rebellious against his upper-crust family, and this led him perversely into a long life of crime before he discovered that he could write. He never resolved his family conflict, and killed himself as his first novel reached the NYT best-seller list. I changed him from an author to a 1950s rockabilly singer with similar lower-crust family problems, who did plenty of drugs and alcohol before committing one big crime. I found him to be every bit as human as his real-life counterpart, and every bit as tragic.

Anybody out there got any unusual tales of how their characters sprang into being? I like these stories, and I think others like them, too.

Plots.  You can’t live without ‘em.  And I’ve got to say plotting is the toughest part of the writing process for me.

Okay, that’s not a shocking revelation, and I’m sure not a single jaw is dropping right now, but I keep reading about authors who dash off outlines so complete, the actual writing of the book is easy. I don’t remember which author said this, but he said that his outlines are longer than the novels they spawn!  I am so envious of those who can come up with fully-formed stories before ever writing a single word. What’s worse, these people seem to be everywhere, especially in the stables of major publishers.

Meanwhile, I seem to be congenitally incapable of creating an outline, or even of envisioning a story from start to finish. Instead, I slog along from line to line, not knowing what’s coming next. I may or may not have a hazy image of an ending, but that’s about it.  I wrote my last novel from an opening line, without having the slightest clue as to what the next line would be, or what the story would be about.

I know, I know, there are no rules. That if writing without an outline works for me, or for anyone else, then that’s what we should do. Okay, I accept that. But here I am whining about not being able to outline or to even come up with a semblance of a story up front, and I’ll just bet my little old bottom dollar that there isn’t one single outliner out there who envies me. I once read a piece Harry Whittington wrote about his own writing career, and he said, “I could plot, baby. I could plot.” I’m quite sure he spent no time wishing he couldn’t plot, and had to instead rely upon limping from one line to the next. In fact, Harry Whittington aside, I’ll bet that no one who uses an outline wishes they could do it the other way.

How about it? Am I really doomed, or am I wasting energy wishing I could fabricate plots in advance?

Russel D McLean put up a thoughtful post on today’s Do Some Damage blogspot. It concerned the length of novels, with a side conversation about pricing relative to length. The length part was what caught my eye, though. I’ve had all kinds of problems with this.

My first published novel, The Take, will be coming out in 2010, but that was not the first novel I had written. There were several others, the first two of which exceeded 100,000 words. One of those weighed in at 180,000 words before I called it a day, although subsequent drafts eventually “slimmed” it down to about 130,000.

After those two efforts, I never again came close to those numbers. Probably because they weren’t crime novels, and everything I’ve written after that has been in the crime genre. The Take, mentioned above, topped out at 51,000 words. My others are in the same ballpark, only one of them exceeding 60,000 words, and that just barely. My latest one, which I’ve just finished, limped across the finish line at 39,000! A second going-over added about another 2000 words, but it still sits at a paltry 41,000.

I don’t know what my problem is. These stories play themselves out in a natural fashion, and in my opinion, they don’t feel at all rushed. The 41,000-word novel is even a slightly bigger story than the others and fairly begs for more words (like twice as many), but I just can’t find them to put in there. I don’t plan it this way. It’s just that when the story is about to wind up, the word count is pathetically low.

Adding clunky subplots just for the sake of piling on the words is not an option for me. I hate books that do that. These novels of mine are not overblown short stories, either. They’re fully-developed novels in every sense of the word. Every sense, that is, except length.

Anybody got any ideas? Anything I can grab onto?

I read an interesting blog today by Mike Knowles on the Do Some Damage blogspot. Mike is a successful Canadian crime fiction author, and he hit on a subject which I suspect has troubled many authors from time to time. Without putting any pink ribbons on it, it’s writer’s block.

He writes “without a net”, that is, with no organized outline or detailed plan. He pretty much wings it, and it works well for him. Every once in a while, though, he finds himself and his characters with their backs against the wall, plotwise. With no outs.

Eventually, Mike hacks his way out of the thicket, usually in an unlikely place–the shower, while walking his dog, etc–and goes on to finish the novel. But I wondered if he ever had to really put a novel completely aside because he just couldn’t find the escape hatch from his writer’s block dungeon.

Well, like Mike, I also “write without a net”. I don’t use an outline, because I can’t plan the story that far in advance, so I begin writing on the slimmest of premises. I have a novel coming out next year, a noir tale called The Take, which was inspired by two lines of a song. That’s all I had to go on when I started writing it. Another one began when I saw a guy in a bar one night trying in vain to impress a girl. The one I’m working on now started from an opening line. As soon as I wrote it, I had no idea what the second line would be.

But in every case, I soldiered on, transforming these fragile ideas into full-blown novels. Well, in almost every case.

There was one project which started off as a slam-bang idea. I sat down to write it fifteen years ago. A guy is killed by people who want the contents of a small box he is hiding. His widow takes her son and the box and immediately splits town, fearing she and her son will be the next to die. Many years later, she dies, and the son, who is now an adult, finally learns the terrible secret of what’s in the box. He also learns the killers haven’t given up and have located him. He then begins the dual task of trying to deal with the contents of the box and avoiding his pursuers.

Sounds good, right? Well, I got about 100 pages in and I just broke apart like a bug hitting a windshield. Suddenly, nothing came to me, I was completely stalled out, unable to write even one more line. Weeks went by. Nothing. I was so discouraged, because I loved the idea. But after endless hours of staring at a blank screen, I got nowhere. Then, I got some flimsy idea for another book, so I started that one, putting this one aside.

Years went by. Every so often, I would dig around in boxes, and on two or three occasions, I actually saw the 100-page printout of that aborted novel. A twinge of remorse shot through me every time I saw it, as I realized that such a good idea had gone down the drain.

Okay, so now I’m working on my current novel, you know, the one I started from just an opening line. I’m rolling along, but when I get 20,000 words in, I start to run out of gas. I feel the sputtering and I know that I will be at a complete standstill in very short order. I beg the characters to guide me out of this corner I’ve painted myself into, until…until…

Until I think, why not have the girl who was killed be the granddaughter of a guy who was killed in the same fashion many years ago? And they were both killed because…the killers wanted the contents of a small box the grandfather was guarding at the time of his murder. Bingo! His widow takes her son and splits town. Her son has two daughters, one is killed, the other teams up with a central character who has been dragged into this and…and…

Well, you get the idea. The fifteen-year-old idea was resuscitated, and is now kicking ass! And the end is in sight.

Say hallelujah!

The onset of the Internet Age has, and will continue to, decentralize the publishing business, exactly as it has the record business. Remember when there were just a few major record companies? They had all the big action, all the big artists, and all the money. If you wanted to make a mark as a recording artist, you had no choice but to get with one of them.

Now…the record business is in shambles, scrambling for its very existence. Because of sophisticated recording software, bands and songwriters can produce their own albums and distribute them themselves via well-constructed internet platforms. In addition, they tour in order to hype these albums. Many more albums are being produced than ever before, almost none of them with blockbuster sales figures, but the small, unknown artist who once had no shot with a major label is now enjoying modest success instead of guaranteed eternal oblivion.

This effectively created a direct line from the artist to the consumer. Independent record stores were quickly swept aside, leaving only the big chains, whose inventory and customer base continued to shrink until the chains, too, are disappearing.

Any of this sound familiar?

Well, like good music, good stories will never go away. Navel-gazers may wonder which sub-genre will pull to the forefront. What will happen to the PI novel? The hardboiled?  The cozy? The real answer is, there’s going to be more of everything, thanks to POD technology and ePublishing, among other things. It’s quite likely that little or none of this new writing will sell in the Stephen King stratosphere, but who cares? More writers will be published, read, and encouraged to continue writing. And one day, who knows what might happen to any of them?

Once shunned by big publishers and published authors alike, POD and ePublishing are now being quietly embraced by them. Publishers see value in starting up POD and ebook divisions: they can throw untried writers out at the market for a tiny fraction of the cost of going hardcover. If one or two of them catch on, they make money. After all, the next Michael Connelly is out there somewhere, slaving away over his computer, and this is a pretty cheap way of finding him. Meanwhile, small POD presses and ePublishers are sprouting up all over the landscape.

For the hopeful writer, good writing and perseverance are the key elements.

A professional is simply an amateur who didn’t quit.

While browsing the “Do Some Damage” crime fiction blogspot, I came across an interesting post by Jay Stringer.  He talked about novels as part of a series, and how everyone asked him if his upcoming book was in fact the opener of a series.  It led me to think more about the idea of series novels.

Series writing is often exemplified by Raymond Chandler and his Philip Marlowe novels and stories, in which Marlowe traipses from one book to the next in what was supposed to be “beautiful” Los Angeles of the 1940s and 1950s.  In each book, he encounters his requisite quota of lowlifes, edgy cops, and double-crossing dames, and each book can stand quite nicely on its own.

Chandler was one of the first crime novelists to employ a central character whose principal trait was his world-weariness, rather than a square-jawed righteousness.  Marlowe didn’t give a shit about truth, justice, and the American way.  At least, not so you’d know it.  He appeared to be driven by a need for money far more than a need for justice, but beneath his tough-guy veneer was what might be referred to as a “heart of gold”. Chandler called it “nobility”.  Either way, Marlowe would never relinquish it for any amount of money.

Earl Derr Biggers penned a whole lot of Charlie Chan novels way back when.  Today, the movies that were made from them are way better known than the novels, but that series about the Honolulu detective and his global exploits was wildly popular in its day.  The characters–Chan, his numbered sons, and others–ran through all the books and, eventually, the movies, but as with Chandler, each book was a stand-alone, satisfying the reader by ending with a neatly-tied wrapup of the proceedings.

Another type of series writing features not only the same character or characters running through a group of novels, but also a continuous story line.  Herman Wouk authored a masterful two-book series, Winds Of War followed by War And Remembrance, a titanic tale of a group of individuals swept up in World War II.  Each book could stand alone if it had to, but I can’t imagine anyone wanting to read only Winds and not insisting on finishing the story.  It was, as I posted in Jay Stringer’s blog, really one huge book divided in two.

James Ellroy, about whom I have written on this site, spent a good many years assembling his LA Quartet of novels, which include The Black Dahlia, LA Confidential, The Big Nowhere, and White Jazz.  I suppose any one of these novels could be read as a stand-alone, but it would be pretty difficult, because the story arc begs you to continue to the next one.  Taken as a whole, the LA Quartet is a masterpiece, both in plotting and style.

Not to say you can breeze through it, mind you.  Ellroy’s a tough read.  His staccato style and graphic description are off-putting to a great many readers raised on Sidney Sheldon or Danielle Steele.  Without question, he’s profane to the max, but that’s the truth of the world in which his characters reside. It’s a profane world, and a monstrously evil one at that.  He shows us the evil, and I mean real evil, that festers (and even prospers) below the world most of us know. But truly grasping the scope of this evil–and it is vast–requires the reader to plow through the entire series.  He lifts the veil on the LA of the 1940s and 1950s in a way in which Chandler never could, because Marlowe was too steeped in nobility.  Ellroy’s characters can’t afford to be noble.  They’ll end up with their faces shot off.

Ellroy’s new series, Underworld USA, is currently winding up with his latest release, Blood’s A Rover.  Unlike the LA Quartet, whose broad story line was more or less confined to Los Angeles, this trilogy spreads out over the whole country, as well as Central America and the Caribbean, covering the period from 1958 onward. It includes the runup to the JFK assassination, then on through to around 1972, an era commonly called “the sixties”.  Again, I can’t really comprehend how anyone wouldn’t want to read all three books, even though each one could theoretically stand alone.

Two of my favorite noir authors are Jim Thompson and David Goodis.  They never actually wrote series books, but if you read five or six novels by each of them, you get a very clear idea of a running theme.  Thompson got inside the criminal mind better than anyone, showing how seemingly ordinary people can become vile beasts.  Goodis takes you to the meanest streets you’ll ever walk, and makes you glad you never had to walk them by yourself.  Together, these two guys lead you straight into hell and never lead you out.  It’s this sort of non-series series writing that makes them so compelling.

I’m onto another, more unusual kind of series writing, but I’ll get into that another time.