Bryan Gilmer

Have to point you toward this excellent blog post by fellow North Carolina author A.J. Hartley, a Shakespearean scholar and prolific author of everything from grownup thrillers to young adult novels and a new novelization of Macbeth — and a great guy to enjoy a pint with at any writing conference. The basic message: Don’t be a poseur. But acknowledge that, when the world has millions of novels and stories, thinking that it needs one more from you is arrogant, anyhow, so you may as well own that and use it to propel you:

Let me add another necessary but much maligned word: arrogance. Writing requires a little of that too. I realize that plenty of writers are fairly shy, retiring types who relish the quiet and solitude of a glowing computer monitor, but I’m not talking about being an extravert in personality terms. I’m talking about the kind of arrogance that says “I have something to say: a story to tell: a way with a phrase.” I mean the arrogance which is required, which is NECESSARY to say to friends, family and (ultimately) the world in general “I’ve written this and you should really read it.” It takes courage to start writing a book, but it takes a certain monomaniacal arrogance to finish it.

Having just watched the North Carolina Tar Heels men’s basketball team lose to Florida State last Saturday because they didn’t walk onto the court with the swagger — and serious determination — they deserved to have and needed to win, this rings especially true.

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One thing that separates great writing from forgettable writing is an author who is willing to keep working on a piece to make it better. Even though the writing staff of The Colbert Report turns around each show in only a day, according to this New York Times Magazine piece, they leave at least as much good material on the floor as they broadcast. As Colbert puts it, “Make it perfect, and then cut it.” In other words, not only is the material good enough to go on the show, but is it also good enough to beat out other material to get onto the show?

I had the weird experience a few weeks back of reworking the first chapter of my third novel, Record of Wrongs, a chapter I had read and revised at least 100 times, and finding major things to fix. I rearranged two happenings, tweaked a point of view and trimmed some words from sentences. Something about that section had bugged me, and my conscious mind finally figured out what.

There is a point at which you have to let something go and find an audience. But that point is after a lot more work than most non-writers or new writers imagine. The key skill is critical thinking, always trying to see the writing as a reader will and asking yourself how you can make it more effective. Click READ MORE and give me your thoughts.

Raleigh television host Stacey Cochran was kind enough to invite me to appear on his great show, “The Artist’s Craft.” Take a look and see what you think. The interview runs about a half hour. I’ll also be appearing on a live panel hosted by Stacey in February at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh. Details to follow.

If anyone has further questions not answered in the video interview, pose them in the comments, and I’ll be happy to respond. Click “Read More” to reach the comments page.”

Image courtesy of chanpipat.

I probably disagree with most of what Sam Harris believes (he’s antireligious a la Christopher Hitchens, while I’m a person of faith who can’t understand how it’s not obvious to everyone that God exists). However, a post on his blog fascinates me as a crime writer. He articulates a few quite sensible principles of self defense, which I paraphrase here, expanding his list of three to the four big principles he really sets out:

1. Avoid dangerous people and places. Even if you’re a Navy SEAL, don’t walk down a sketchy, dark alley at night. If a guy challenges your manhood in a bar, cede the moment to him to defuse a confrontation. Even if you can win the fight, you could be sent to prison for harming the other person.
2. Do not defend your property. Give the robber

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Any good author has a few trusted fellow writers who can offer a tough critique of a draft. The key here is for the critique partner to be on the writer’s side, but still unafraid to challenge the writer to improve the piece and to get rid of elements that don’t work. Usually, you need another writer who’s a little better than you to give you a useful critique; regular friends simply won’t be tough enough or know what to suggest. You also need the courage to hear tough critique without despairing — to accept that what you first wrote can get better and to make it so. Journalism got me used to this, and writers who come from another background often need to get better at it.

To give you an idea of how tough is useful, and to smooth your transition to Happy Hour on a Friday afternoon, I’ve offered Vanilla Ice my critique of the first verse of Ice, Ice Baby. Enjoy:

In St. Louis last month, I came upon a drunk man in an alley. He was carrying a baby strapped into a car seat, but he was so impaired he kept dropping the child on the ground. By shouting at him, I finally got him to place the baby safely on the gound near a trash bin, but then he pulled a machete, raised it over his head and rushed toward me. I shouted for him to him to stop.

But he kept coming.

I drew my Glock pistol and shot him 15 times in the head and chest.

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Recently, I went to see a random bill of four unknown bands at a local rock club. One stood out.

First, the scene: The crowd was light, and many in the audience clung to the bar and the edges of the room rather than standing by the stage. The first couple of bands started their set by ordering the crowd to come close to the stage. People generally ignored the instruction. I stayed at the bar, myself, thinking, “Why should I?” When they started playing, it struck me that these bands sounded like they were trying to be other, specific bands. There was a Green Day clone. A Foo Fighters clone. These guys had a studied indie-rock look, had chosen their guitars apparently to look good on stage rather than for sound. (One lead guitarist played a $1,500 archtop with so much distortion that he turned it into a pawnshop Telecaster.) The between-songs banter was full of attitude and

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Thought some non-authors might be interested in hearing about two vexing and universal plot problems every modern crime novelist must solve in every book. If you haven’t thought about this before as a reader, you’ll spot a novelist’s solutions every time from here on out. If you’re an author, please comment and let us know how you solved these problems in your books.

1. Why don’t they just call the police? There has to be some good reason that the victim or hero doesn’t simply call the law. Possible solutions to this dilemma: The police are too far away to get there in time; the police suspect the person calling of being a criminal; the police are aligned with/co-opted by the villain; the police are the villain(s); the police are incompetent; the police believe the wrong theory of the case when the hero/victim’s theory is actually onto the true one. Or the hero is using illegal/unethical means to solve the case and so can’t let the police know it. The villain will kill the hostage if the victim or hero calls the police. The traditional solution, of course, is to have your hero BE a cop.

2. Why doesn’t he/she just call him/her and ask? With every human being in the United States carrying a cellphone all the time, it is hard to have one character know something while another related character doesn’t. Possible solutions: Battery is dead; person lost their phone; villain stole/disabled phone; phone is out of range of a tower; call comes in, but because of an emergency/tense situation, person can’t immediately answer; person answers but unknown to caller, the villain is there monitoring every word. How wonderful it must have been to write crime fiction when there was no way to reach someone if they were away from their home or desk rotary-dial phone! Not only that, from here on out, we have to assume that people are able to use Google and check email on their phones, too.

Any dilemmas I’m missing? Click READ MORE and post a comment telling us what.

My old St. Pete Times buddy Chris Goffard has a great piece in the L.A. Times about hardcore homeless guys given a room by a charitable program and about the woman who runs the program. Chris is also a novelist, and I can’t help but see the seeds of the characters in his darkly comic crime noir novelSnitch Jacket in real-life vignettes like these. Particularly admirable is the article’s ending.

A taste:

On the streets, veteran hustlers regarded Sigler as a mark, someone whose self-esteem vanished when he drank and who could be wheedled out of cash and dope.

At the Senator Hotel, his best friend was a wheelchair-bound, brain-damaged man, Mohammed Duala, and at night Sigler lifted his body out of his wheelchair and tucked him gently into bed. “He wants to die,” Sigler said. “He’ll sit there and say, ‘I got no chance anymore. I can’t talk, bro.’”

Sigler understood the impulse. Around the holidays especially, the desire to kill himself was strong.

This is what journalism can be.
Now go read the whole piece.
 

Sakey drinks bouron with fellow crime novelist Sean Chercover. Photo by Brett Carlson.

Today concludes my series of posts on how to start a thriller novel off right. We’ve been analyzing the first chapter of THE TWO DEATHS OF DANIEL HAYES by Marcus Sakey, which you can read online for free. In the first post, I named many of the conflicting priorities a novelist has to serve in the first scene. In the second, we looked at how Sakey works to accomplish nearly all of them in his very first paragraph.

Today, I want to talk about the real magic of this chapter — that it revolves around a fascinating idea that’s complex enough to build a whole novel around: A man regains awareness on a desolate beach, naked in the ocean and nearly drowned. He can’t remember who he is or how he got here. He crawls

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