First Lines

Michelle McLean, one of the fine ladies blogging for Operation Awesome, recently had a post about how first lines can captivate us:

I recently finished reading Rick Riordan’s The Lost Hero. Aside from really enjoying the book, I was struck by how many awesome first lines he had. The first line of the book was amazing:

Even before he got electrocuted, Jason was having a rotten day.

My inner editor immediately stopped to admire that incredible bit of writing. As first lines go, that is made of total win (at least imo).

But it didn’t stop there. Several times throughout the book, I’d turn the page to start a new chapter and got blown away by that chapter’s first line. Here are a few of my favorites.

1. Leo wished the dragon hadn’t landed on the toilets.
2. As soon as Jason saw the house, he knew he was a dead man.
3. Leo’s tour was going great until he learned about the dragon.
4. After a morning of storm spirits, goat men, and flying boyfriends, Piper should’ve been losing her mind.
5. Jason would have died five times on the way to the front door if not for Leo.
6. When Leo saw how well Piper and Hedge were being treated, he was thoroughly offended.
7. The plan went wrong almost immediately.
8. Leo hadn’t felt this jumpy since he’d offered tofu burgers to the werewolves.

In my work in progress, Assassin’s Club – Doing Good by Being Bad, the first sentence doesn’t exactly slap you in the face, but I’m pretty proud of the first 20 lines.

The man fights his way through the surf. A giant wave crashes over his back, knocking the air from his lungs.

He struggles to stand upright, his arms and legs heavy as lead. He doesn’t remember much. He vaguely recalls thrashing around in the cold water and turning around in time to see the stern of a sailing ship as it glided toward the horizon, jaunty carnival tunes in its wake.

Did I fall from that? Or get pushed?

The water tugs at his legs like a needy lover. Finally he finds himself on hot, dry sand and falls to his knees. He has a pounding headache and blood on his hand from when he touches the throbbing knot on the back of his scalp.

Where the hell am I? Who am I?

The voices in his head provide no answers.

A hazy figure appears far up the beach and so he walks in that direction. The sun feels good on his back. Overhead, seagulls circle and chatter in their private language. After a few minutes he can make out some details of the approaching figure – a tall woman in a flowing white gown with sunflower-gold hair. She walks with her head down as if overwhelmed by a great sadness. Or maybe just looking for pretty shells.

A terrible fear jolts his heart.

She’s in mortal danger. Something awful is about to befall her.

Close now, she looks up and laughs at him. “Jesus, you’re naked!”

So that’s who I am.

The first line of chapter two (which was originally chapter one, until I decided my serial killer needed a friend to play with) was more successful, I believe:

Tyler Goode didn’t know the man’s real name until he read the obituary three days later.

Writers can engage the reader without needing an exploding helicopter in the first paragraph, but the opening should at least raise the reader’s curiosity about the dramatic, humorous or informative material to follow.

The Opening Chapter

Nate Bransford is a literary agent in California, and is both a brilliant and dedicated blogger. This week he has a guest blogger, Valerie Kemp, who did an insightful post on the characteristics of a novel's first chapter. Here's an excerpt from that post:

The Hunger Games - In the first chapter of The Hunger Games we get to see Katniss' everyday world. We learn about the Hunger Games and the Reaping and the high chance that Gale and Katniss will be picked. We see that Katniss is responsible and protective of her sister, Prim, whose name is in the Reaping for the first time. And in the very last sentence of the chapter there's a shock as Prim's name is called.

This is a GREAT end of a first chapter. As a reader we're left with a sense of dread. We know what Katniss must do, and we know that we're in for an exciting ride because we're going to experience the Hunger Games with Katniss. We're also introduced to the mechanics of Collin's writing - cliffhanger chapters. Both with story and with structure, she has shown us what to expect, and how to read her book. And she delivers.

Now imagine if The Hunger Games started differently. What if the first chapter was an ordinary day at school for Katniss, followed by time at home with her family, and hanging out with Gale. Suzanne Collins could've started there and gone into greater detail about Katniss' troubled relationship with her mom, given us more history on the District, how life in The Seam works, etc. She could've had the Reaping happen in chapter 3. By then we might be expecting the book to be a family drama or something else completely unrelated to a reality show about teens fighting to the death. If Collins had started her book this way, she probably would've lost a lot of readers. I know I would've been flipping back to the cover over and over again, wondering when these supposedly awesome Hunger Games were going to start. I probably would've put the book down before the action started and picked up something else.

Old Farts Club excerpt from "Montana is Burning"

At the 2010 Flathead River Writers Conference, I had a very encouraging talk with Gordon Warnock from Andrea Hurst Literary Management. However, he informed me that my (supposedly) completed novel is about 30,000 words too long for a first-time author. Ouch. So I must say goodbye to some (in my opinion) wonderful chunks of verbiage that develop characterization, establish mood, and plant clues. I need to do those things with greater brevity, it appears. So here's a chapter that's being lopped out:

Ole’s Café, Kintla, Montana

Saturday – 10:00 a.m. (The morning after a nearby abortion clinic was firebombed)

Surely every coffee shop on the planet has one, a large table where the Old Farts Club gathers each morning to complain about the world going to hell in a hand basket. The round table in Ole's Cafe in Kintla had eight oak chairs.

Ralph Morrissey, the town's funeral director, walked into Ole's and saw several reporters forced to stand at the counter, even though there was still an empty chair at the big table. It was gratifying, he thought, to see that some things in this world could still be depended upon.

He took the vacant seat between banker James Otto and rancher Duke Overbeek. Everybody nodded at the mortician and Otto flipped over a clean cup for him. As usual, at least three different conversations were going on, with some fellows jumping from one to another depending on which topic caught their interest. Morrissey jumped in with the group discussing last night’s firebombing and was immediately interrupted by Huz Brandt, the local accountant.

“You missed a couple great jokes, Digger," Brandt said. "You know what you get when you cross a Mormon with an Indian?"

“A basement full of stolen canned goods," blurted insurance agent Jay Aster.

Despite having heard the joke minutes earlier, the table erupted in laughter. Morrissey, who had both LDS and Native American friends, sat stony-faced. He noticed Bobby Jones looked like he'd gotten a whiff of something rancid.

Jones spoke before Morrissey could think of a comeback. "I heard there's no humor without an element of truth. Maybe we oughta change that to humiliation."

"Lighten up, Bobby," Brandt said. "Don't tell me you didn't bust up some prairie niggers off the Rez when you were carrying a badge down in Missoula."

A muscle twitched on the retired deputy's square jaw. "Naw, I was too busy writing DUI's for members of the Chamber of Commerce."

Brandt's cheeks turned crimson. Everybody at the table knew the CPA had recently picked up his third drunk-driving ticket. They all looked around at nothing in particular, hoping somebody would change the subject before things got even more unpleasant.

Bobby Jones jumped in again to change the subject. "I almost made my first taxi trip yesterday. This college kid got busted at St. Joseph and the Border Patrol confiscated his daddy's Mercedes. He hitched a ride into town, then showed up on my porch with his sad story. 'Just some seeds, Man. Just some seeds,' he says."

"What happened?" Brandt asked. "No money?"

"Naw, he showed me more'n enough for the trip. I told him to come back at six and we'd go to Edgerton after supper. Musta got another ride, because he never showed."

Overbeek leaned forward. "Speaking of no-shows, did you hear Chief Holland ducked out of the limelight and put that new detective in charge of the arson investigation? You know, the religious nut.”

"Paul Longo is his name," Jones said. "I bumped into him at the courthouse last week. Didn't seem like a nut to me."

Huz Brandt sneered. "There's a lot of local boys coulda done the job just as well. They know the valley better than some kid just rolled into town."

"He’s no kid, Huz," Jones laughed. "Trouble is, you think anyone not drawing Social Security is still in diapers. And just because he doesn't swear every fifth word, that doesn't make him a Jesus freak."

"It's all just politics," Overbeek said. "Frye probably hoped Holland would stub his toe on this abortion clinic thing, so Holland put one of the Sheriff’s boys in charge of solving it.”

"Then the Chief’s got the wrong guy," Jones said. "Longo's no politician. Hell, he’s the only one on the force who’s not up to his butt in the election.”

Meanwhile, a discussion across the table about forest fires had evolved into a diatribe against government is general and Congress in particular. Jay Aster, the coffee klatch’s token Democrat, was taking a merciless ribbing from the other men. He turned to Morrissey after a few minutes of this abuse.

"Hey, Digger, I've never seen you this quiet before. Business can't be all that bad, I hear people are just dying to get into your place."

"Oh, I'm busy enough but the cremations are killing my bottom line. The only bright spot is the folks who choose a box-and-burn job are usually cheapskates like you who’d stiff me on the bill anyway."

James Otto, the banker sitting next to him, cleared his throat. “Wake up on the wrong side of the embalming table?”

"I’m fried over those nuts that bombed the clinic," Morrissey said. "What with them and this new militia group people are whispering about, plus the morons we send to the legislature, I'm ashamed to call myself a Montanan."

"Didn't you move here from Oregon?" Brandt needled.

"I'm serious here," Morrissey said. "The more I think about it, the more steamed I get. There's not one Montanan in a thousand who thinks murder is the way to win a political argument."

"Damn right," Overbeek said.

The funeral director brought his fist down on the table, rattling coffee cups and saucers. “The rest of us have to stand up to the pinheads responsible for this terrorist act and let them know we won't tolerate such an outrage.”

“I'm with you a hundred percent so far,” Jones said. "You got something in mind?"

Morrissey stood up. “You bet I do. Come over to the mortuary chapel at one o'clock and bring a couple friends.”

Writer Conference-ing

I'm excited about attending the 20th annual Flathead River Writers Conference this weekend (Oct 2-3) in Kalispell, Montana. I had a conflict and couldn't attend last year. When I've attended in the past, I've always enjoyed meeting new people, learning new "tricks of the trade," and storing up enough enthusiasm to keep writing for another 11 or 12 months.

I was recently involved in a discussion thread for the Writers Etc group (on Facebook) and was asked for advice on what to do at a conference. I surprise myself (and everybody else, no doubt) by coming up with something fairly coherent, which is as follows:

Try to develop a 2-3 sentence "elevator pitch" in case you get some time with an agent or editor, for example at lunch or in a workshop, and if it's appropriate to mention what you're working on. If time allows, ask them how you could improve your pitch. This can be a good way to create a favorable impression.

Conferences are great for making contacts, but don't try to make a deal then and there. After you get home, mail or email a nice letter saying how nice it was to meet him/her at ABC writers conference and you appreciated their guidance on your pitch for "XYZ" work in progress. Then ask if you can send them your first few chapters.

Good luck and have fun.

Critique Danger

One of the best things I’ve done in my journey as a writer was to form a local critique group.

There were a couple of groups in the area, loosely affiliated with the Authors of the Flathead, but they weren’t taking new members. I twisted a couple arms and soon we had three regulars. We decided five or six was an optimal number, and over the last decade we’ve gone through a dozen or more in the last few seats. Now we’ve got five regular contributors plus one guy who’s a talented editor but not writing at the moment.

The critique group gives me the regular deadline I need to keep me on task. The members are great at catching the stupid mistakes I can’t see because I’m too close to my work, and are experts at asking pesky questions like “Why not do XYZ instead?” Because we mostly work in different genres – thrillers, YA, women’s fiction, memoir and who-knows-how-to-classify-Nick – they keep me open to possibilities. More than that, they’re a fantastic support group.

But I have learned to take some comments with a grain of salt. If I hear a criticism from one member, maybe that person’s just having a bad hair day, or doesn’t get my particular genre. If several of the members make the same observation, then obviously I’ve got to seriously evaluate their concern.

One danger is the tendency of members to try nudging a WIP in a different direction because of our preconceived ideas of how it should be written. In editing and making suggestions, it’s critical that we not alter the voice and tone of our fellow writers.

It’s what makes us unique.

Fear of Heights

I used to have a terrible fear of heights. Whether standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon or looking out a window on a skyscraper, I’d get a queasy feeling deep in my gut and a lightheaded sensation between my ears. Don’t even talk to me about airliner takeoffs and landings. But I finally overcame it.

You see, I volunteered for airborne training in the U.S. Army. Jumping out of perfectly good airplanes and all that.

As writers, we all have aspects of our craft that are stronger and weaker than others. Writing dialogue was a real problem for me when I first tried my hand at fiction. Terribly stilted and everybody sounded the same. My critique group pointed this out. Their suggestions: study good dialogue writers and practice a lot.

So I read a lot of Elmore “Dutch” Leonard, Robert B. Parker, Walter Mosley, Carl Hiaasen, Max Barry and Richard Price. Also, I took my faithful yellow pad out to coffee in the morning, and wouldn’t leave the coffee house until I’d written at least a couple pages of dialogue. No narrative. No attributions. Just pure dialogue.

Gradually, I improved Maybe I’m wrong, but now I feel that dialogue has become one of my strengths.

Because I worked at it.

Making a Decision

A friend on Facebook is struggling with identity. Is this writer “a gay author” or “an author who happens to be gay?” There’s a world of difference in terms of context, audience, marketing, and on and on.

For this writer, there’s no right or wrong answer. But a decision needs to be made.

Similarly, when someone in my critique group has a scene that just doesn’t work, often it’s because the author is reluctant to make a decision or doesn’t see the need to do so.

You’re reading about the feds interrogating a suspect at the downtown FBI office. They’re in a private room and there’s mention of a desk and chairs. There’s a telephone somewhere. That’s it. It could be the same cubbyhole of an interrogation room we’ve seen in a thousand Law and Order episodes, or the ultra-modern, high tech rooms shown in CSI. Or it could be something else entirely. Maybe all the other interview rooms are occupied, and the Captain ‘s office is the only available space. Maybe the agent wants to put the suspect at ease, and uses the employee lounge (I think Richard Price did this). We’ll never know, because the author doesn’t think it’s important to establish a sense of place. A decision was not made.

In the room with the agent in charge is a young guy, an unnamed junior agent. He asks a couple questions but doesn’t contribute much. So much could be done with this minor character. One of his buddies might have been wounded or killed in the crime being investigated, and he’s seething with anger. Maybe he thinks the senior agent is an old fashioned fuddy-duddy who’s about to screw up the investigation with his obsolete methods. Maybe he was awakened after a late night at a bar, and he’s hungover. Maybe he was arguing furiously with his girlfriend (or boyfriend) when the phone rang. Maybe he’d been smoking dope, and can’t quite focus on who did what to whom. His character could change the dynamics in the interrogation room in myriad ways, but it didn’t happen. Because a decision was not made.

Sometimes you have colorful, edgy characters in a scene but it never really takes off. Chances are, the author didn’t scratch his head before writing the scene to decide what each character’s goals would be, and to make sure they conflict with one another. Mary wants a loan so she can help her secret lover, John, who she’s determined to be faithful to. She swallows her disgust to ask Peter, her repellent landlord. Peter can afford to make the loan but wants to get Mary into bed with him as a willing partner. If one wins, the other loses.

It can be an exciting scene – if a decision is made.

Wolf and Eagle

This ties together two earlier posts - "Eagle" and "Wolf," and may or may not be included in my novel "Montana is Burning."

The golden eagle sliced through the air, miles from where scattered rain drenched a small clearing and the stream that ran through it. She spiraled upward with little effort, riding a thermal current as she waited for the storm to break up.

The eagle was the perfect aerial predator, with cruel talons and a beak that could disembowel an adult sheep. She was death from the sky. Lacking an owl’s night vision, she couldn’t hunt after dark, even though high winds had kept her pinned to her aerie for more than a week and starvation threatened.

She circled and watched. In a valley far below, dry lightning struck a large snag and it burst into flames. Since no animals fled from the fire, the eagle quickly lost interest. She flew on.

The isolated storm finished venting its fury on the clearing and sped east. Dim memories drew the eagle above a stream where salmon returned each summer’s end and trout grew fat and pink on the helpless spawn – ancestral memories of hunts and feasts by eagles long dead but memories no less real. The raptor smelled blood and tasted flesh as if the kills had been her own.

The great bird spotted the glitter of whitewater skittering across rocks made smooth by eons of glacial runoff, and saw dark shapes carving their way beneath the surface.

She dipped a chocolate-brown wing and dropped below the air current. The eagle descended slowly at first, then folded her wings next to her body to plunge like lightning drawn to earth.

Her freefall lasted hundreds of feet before she spread wide her wings, pulling out of the meteoric dive. With hardly an eddy on the water’s surface, she ripped a trout from the icy stream and started back to her craggy perch, blood on her talons and savagery in her cry.

As she climbed through the warm air, the golden eagle spotted the valley where lightning struck a snag earlier. Flames burned greedily and jumped to neighboring scrub pine. Only the eagle saw.

In the great bird’s wake, a wolf erupted into the opening and sprang across the stream, but the whitetail he had been stalking already bounded far down the slope, startled by the exultant screech from above. Stopping at the edge of the clearing, the wolf listened to the doe’s flight.

The wolf turned from the fading sound of escape. He jogged toward remembered cattle.

The world, after all, was full of prey.

Eagle

This section is tied to "Wolf" two posts ago. Not sure whether or not it'll end up being part of my first novel, "Montana is Burning." It takes place in NW Montana in modern times.

The golden eagle circled high over a remote valley twenty miles west of Kintla.

A burning snag sent a faint column of smoke aloft. The eagle knew fire usually flushes small animals from their hiding places but not this time. A pine beetle infestation had devastated the valley, leaving behind mostly rotten stumps and scarcely any healthy trees. Despite a huge insect population, there were almost no green branches and so hardly any rodents, birds or small game lived there. Above the size of centipedes, the valley was practically lifeless.

The great bird found a sturdy branch high in an ancient pine. She waited.

Like waves rippling out from a pebble dropped in a fiery lake, a circle of flame spread around the snag, painting the pale underbelly of the clouds an angry red. The lower branches of several nearby spruce caught fire. The expanding poo1 lapped across the matted carpet of pine needles, burning into the forest floor until it ran out of air.

A dark cloud passed overhead, so heavy with water vapor that it began to condense. A shower doused the valley and the eagle sought shelter on a lower branch.

Flames hissed and wavered and then finally failed. As if to signal the fire's defeat, the blackened snag teetered and fell. A cloud of ash rose into the damp air then pelted back to earth with the rain.

The snag lay on its side like some grotesque wounded beast. Sheltered from the rain, its underside reflected a dim glow against the ruined forest floor. The fire lived.

The golden eagle took wing and continued her hunt.

Back to Blogging

I've been writing like crazy for the past year. Finished novel #1 - a thriller titled "Montana is Burning" - and queried it for a few months, and got a few "positive rejections" from literary agents, saying the writing was good but my Voice wasn't quite compelling enough. So I put it on a shelf while the publishing industry is in the toilet, and decided to work on a more powerful Voice in novel #2.

Surprise, surprise, novel #2 started being about a serial killer in 1970, but another one horned in as well. So now "Assassin's Club - Doing Good by Being Bad" has two serial killers. One is a twenty-something guy in NW Montana who became a murderer "by accident" and is struggling to reconcile himself with his deadly new hobby.

The other is a 30ish man who walks out of the ocean near Ensenada, Mexico, with no memory of who he is, or how he got there. He is christened Jesus by the first person he meets (and murders), and walks up the West Coast toward Seattle, picking up a Manson Family assortment of losers along the way, and leaving behind a trail of corpses.

Obviously, these two will eventually meet, and only one will like to kill again. At about 200 pages, I'm roughly two-thirds of the way through.

Unfortunately, I've let the passion for my novels divert me from blogging. I'm sure my imaginary fan has been quite distressed and so I am determined to climb back on the horse and re-start my blog.

The Wolf

I fell in love with this small section, but finally came to realize it simply didn't fit in my "Montana is Burning" novel. So enjoy:

As shadows lengthened in the forest, a wolf waited.

He awoke at daybreak far to the north with an empty belly. The last surviving member of his pack, he’d eaten nothing but a few rodents the last few days. Alone, he had little hope of killing larger prey.

The wolf turned south and loped toward memories of slow-moving cattle that grazed away from human scents. He stopped to rest when the sun shone directly overhead. A swath of land denuded of trees stretched into the distance to both left and right. He could smell and hear much further than he could see, and sensed no men nearby. He sprinted across. He rested again and then urinated to mark his mission and direction of travel before continuing his journey. The wolf trotted over the Whitefish and Salish Mountains before a familiar scent stopped him on the edge of a grassy meadow.

The cattle still lay in his path but only after many hours’ journey through rolling sand hills. His stomach ached. The wolf ignored his hunger and waited.

Shadows stretched into the clearing below him, masking a swift stream in smears of gray and black. The wolf breathed deep of the warm air and smelled deer once more.

A female. Closer this time. Down-slope and upwind.

The wolf tensed his haunches in readiness.

The whitetail deer edged closer through the shadows, yet not close enough.

The wolf felt the weather change. A storm front was passing by. The humidity rose as clouds rolled overhead, smothering the landscape in featureless murk. Lightning crackled in the distance.

The lone male might as well have been blind. Yet he smelled the sweet fragrance of tamarack, pine and aspen, the loamy earth, the rich droppings left by beast and bird, and the salty blood coursing through the doe. Even through the noisy turbulence of wind and nearby stream, he clearly heard the prey set one hoof on a leaf.

The wind began to swirl. A fat plop of rain struck the cracked earth between his paws. Water sprinkled across the parched clearing. He sensed dusty treetops shuddering at scattered drops. A blanket of heavy, moist air settled around the hunter and now he sensed only water.

He stretched out on his belly and waited.

There you are - the rest of it at the next posting.

Don't Know Much...

...about History - got a snappy beat, doesn't it?

Like the old saw, "I don't know much about art, but I know what I like," we often have a hard time defining the difference between great writing and so-so prose, but we sure as heck know what we like to read: action and dialogue.

If you catch yourself nodding off in the middle of a chapter, what do you do? Usually, your eyes start scrolling down through those dense paragraphs until you come upon (1) Somebody saying something exciting, (2) Somebody punching somebody, or (3) Somebody ripping someone's clothes off.

Perhaps I exaggerate. But not much. Few of us pick up a volume of Socrates or Aristotle when we desire a couple hours of diversion, because one Deep Thought after another starts to make our hair hurt. It's different, though, when the Deep Thoughts arise as a result of choices the protagonist is forced to make, demonstrated by his actions instead of lectures from on high. For example, what if the grandson of long-dead Socrates were to challenge Aristotle to a duel because of an insult by Aristotle's mentor, Plato? (Of course, the grandson would be secretly involved in an affair with the daughter of Aristotle.) To show Artistotle choosing pacifism when a hot-blooded, testosterone-driven teenager is holding a dagger to his neck, might be a bit more compelling than page after page of philosophical whertofores.

Especially if you're writing commercial fiction. But even in the rarified regions of literary fiction, there is a resurgence of "story" if we can believe the latest issue of New Yorker - you know, plot, things happening to interesting people, and the consequences thereof.

Anyway, this writer sometimes yearns to critique stories that are acted out by quirky characters with opposing goals in exotic locales, instead of being trapped inside the protagonist's skull for thousands upon thousands of words.

Dialogue - Not Just People Talking

A recent post on the QueryTracker.net blog got me thinking about dialogue's many roles. It develops character, imparts information, enlivens the prose, changes the pace after a stretch of narrative, heightens tension, and helps set the story in a certain era, region, socioeconomic group and culture. You can even set up the book's theme with some well-crafted dialogue. In Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier, all we know after five pages of listening to protagonist Inman is that he's recovering from combat wounds in an Army hospital. The he meets a blind man selling boiled peanuts on the hospital grounds and asks him who put out his eyes. The blind man says he was born that way.

-Why did you never have any? Inman said.
-Just happened that way.
-Well, Inman said. You're mighty calm. Especially for a man that most would say has taken the little end of the horn all his life.
The blind man said, It might have been worse had I ever been given a glimpse of the world and then lost it.
-Maybe, Inman said. Though what would you pay right now to have your eyeballs back for ten minutes? Plenty, I bet.
The man studied on the question. He worked his tongue around the corner of his mouth. He said, I'd not give an Indian-head cent. I fear it might turn me hateful.
-It's done it to me, Inman said. There's plenty I wish I'd never seen.
-That's not the way I meant it. You said ten minutes. It's having a thing and the loss I'm talking about.

Many readers complained bitterly about Inman being killed off at the end of the book, just as he'd realized the love of his life. But here on pages 5-6, Frazier showed us what was coming.

More than the roles listed above, dialogue embues the story with a certain flavor and authenticity. Elmore Leonard is a master at using a few lines of dialogue to convey the essence of a penitentiary, of military life, of wise guys, of Hollywood, of the ranch, or of a retirement community. In A Painted House, John Grisham shows us a rough-and-tumble family of hill people working on a Depression-era farm, when Deputy Stick investigates the death of a local ruffian.

"Three?" Stick repeated in disbelief. The entire gathering seemed to freeze.

Pappy seized the moment. "Three against one, and there's no way you can take him in for murder. No jury in this county'll ever convict if it's three against one."

For a moment Stick seemed to agree, but he wasn't about to concede. "That's if he's telling the truth. He'll need witnesses, and right now they're few and far between." Stick turned to face Hank again and said, "Who were the three?"

"I didn't ask their names, sir," Hank said with perfect sarcasm. "We didn't have a chance to say howdy. Three against one takes up a lotta time, especially if you're the one."

Everyday conversation, though, is nothing like dialogue in fiction. Listen to people talking on the street, and you'll notice how much is aimless, uninteresting and lacking tension. Conversation is littered with ahs and ums, stutters, false starts, cliches, pointless anecdontes, in-jokes indecipherable to outsiders, and stories that start nowhere and trail off into nothing. Good fictional dialogue might include any of the above in order to establish character, but is generally tightly written, with each participant guided by her goals in that particular scene - preferably conflicting goals, unknown to the other characters. Better yet if each character's goals are mutually exclusive, so one person achieving his goal means another's is denied.

Good dialogue in fiction is tight and lively - reality with all the boring stuff cut out. In this example from Robert B. Parker's Perish Twice, private detective Sunny Randall is trying to get some help from a married detective who has cheating in mind. Sunny speaks first.

Anybody issue him a permit?
We haven't.
But somebody might have.
Yep.
It's something that could be ascertained.
"Ascertained"? Wow, Sunny. You're some talker.
But it could be, I said.
Sure, eventually.
Could you look into that?
Larkin grinned at me.
You ever think how blond our kids would be if we mated? he said.
All the time, I said. See what you can find out for me about the gun.
Will it improve our chances of mating?
Won't hurt them, I said. I nodded at the picture on his desk. They might.
Larkin looked at the picture and smiled.
Yeah, he said. They always do.

Dialogue in fiction mimics reality. It has a conversational tone, and often aspires to the breathless give-and-take of a tennis match. It's often full of slang, profanity, sentence fragments and poor grammar. And good dialogue has a music of its own, plus a succer punch waiting around the corner. Take these co-workers feeling each other out in T.L. Hines' The Unseen:

She put one of her sneakered feet up against the wall behind her, picked a fleck of tobacco off her tongue. "So where do you live, at least?"

"Staying in a place over by Howard University."

Another laugh.

"What?" he asked.

"Howard U-ni-ver-si-ty. How's a white boy like you end up in the District, working for cash under the counter at the Blue Bell, and staying at a place filled with black folks?"

He puffed on his own cigarette, looking down at the ground. "You mean I'm not black?" he asked.

You're Fired - From Critique Group

Sorry, Stuart*, you're not welcome back. Sure, we've struggled at times with finding enough warm bodies to fill the chairs but the simmering tensions were driving everybody crazy, to the point that when you finally erupted in a vomit of rage at our ignorance, bad taste and cruelty - well, it was a relief.

Not that an explanation is needed, but here are some thoughts in case you decide to seek feedback from other writers some day in the distant future.

1. We are only human. Don't let it make you crazy when a member makes a suggestion, and then completely contradicts that advice a few months later. Maybe she changed her mind, or was having a bad hair day, or was flailing around because she couldn't get a grip on your style. Take criticism and suggestions with a grain of salt. Most of us follow this dictum: if one person makes a certain comment, maybe it's because his shorts are bunched too tight, but if two or more echo the same idea, then I probably have a problem I need to deal with.

2. Every comment shouldn't lead to an argument. Aren't you in a group in order to get feedback on your masterpiece? Then disengage your mouth and open your ears. The surest way to cut off constructive criticism is to be defensive, argumentative and emotional when somebody tries to give helpful advice.

3. It's not personal. When a literary agent declines to represent you, it's not because she thinks you're an awful person. When an editor rejects your submission with a form letter, his intention is not to deliberately insult you. When a critiquer isn't engaged by your prose, it's not a personal attack. Not all ideas are great and not all techniques are effective, but the fact that everybody doesn't gush over the brilliance of your work doesn't detract from your worth as a human being. Hell, maybe we're wrong, and you're going to be Hemingway 2.0 (see #1 above). Again, the rest of us are in a group to elevate our craft so we WANT critical comments and specific suggestions (see #2 above).

4. Develop selective amnesia. I admit being an imperfect creature who gets frustrated when I give the same advice for months on end, and fail to see improvement, and sometimes I hurl an ill-considered, Simonesque remark. Sometimes a critiquer is having a bad day and lets slip a snarky comment. Sometimes another writer just doesn't get the message you're trying to convey. When you keep track of critical comments made months, even years earlier, that's not healthy behavior. Bear in mind that when you hold a grudge, the other person is blissfully unaware nearly all the time. Until the eruption, vomit of rage, etc.

Good luck in your literary career. Now go bother somebody else.

(* Name changed to protect a flaming jerk)

A Good Critique Group

To me, my novel critique group has been a wonderful laboratory for experimenting with the craft of writing. Some of what I've learned has been from others pointing out strengths and weaknesses in my own prose. I've also learned a lot from the successes and failures of my fellow critiquers.

From Jake, I learned not to be a snob about grammar. A sentence fragment in exactly the right place can have tremendous impact. But the shorter the better. By the time I get to the end of reading a thirty or forty word sentence, I'm desperately searching for a verb. Not finding one, I retrace my steps to see what I missed. So keep fragments short.

Speaking of short, Jake's one-sentence paragraphs (even one word!) can become habit-forming.

Beware!

He also introduced me to the works of Robert B. Parker, a great example when I've been struggling with dialog.

On the flip side, Jake reminds me not to fall in love with my novel to the point that, once it's written, I neglect all the other wild ideas flitting around in my head. Write the next novel, Jake!

Angie inspires me. She can literally draft a novel in a weekend orgy of typing. It may be rough as hell but there's that pile of pages full of ink, begging to be edited and polished into something great. Like former members Bob and Marie, she's written 2-3 books while I've been worrying over every comma and adverb in my own masterpiece.

She's also great at keeping the focus on a sympathetic protagonist instead of my jumping from POV to POV of all the wackos roaming my mind. She visualizes a character, pushes him into a pit of quicksand, and keeps jabbing his with a stick until he figures out how to save himself.

Angie also reminds me of the need to keep improving my craft. I can't depend on others to fix my spelling an grammar since I don't always have the luxury of waiting 2-4 weeks while a chapter, query letter or synopsis passes through the critique gauntlet.

Wes reminds me of King or Koontz, deftly slipping in a word or phrase that takes your breath away. There is so much power in the exact word picture at just the right moment. But it's hard for the solitary writer to know the difference between the sentence that enlivens an entire page, and one that jolts the reader out of the story. That's why we drive through blizzards in the winter and past beckoning golf courses in the summer, in search of constructive criticism.

Wes also shows me how important it is to anchor a story with sensory details. I understand his genre is not like a whodunit, western or romantic comedy, but some sort of New Age space-travel-but-not-really-sci-fi allegory. But sights and sounds, farts and freckles, idiosyncrasies and memories of your maiden aunt with garlic breath - these are things people can identify with, building rapport between readers and both the story and the hidden author. In my humble opinion, until we breathe life into some sensory images, we're merely throwing adjectives against a wall, hoping something will stick.

Nick, a landscape artist new to writing, is full of energy and enthusiasm about this new creative outlet. He reminds me how vital it is to nurture the wide-eyed child within each of us, keeping him at arm's length from that crabby old editor. We've got to give ourselves freedom to write crap, to follow our pens where they lead us, and to take risks. Some of that crap turns into pretty good, uh, lit once it's been worked on a bit, whereas there's not much you can do with a blank sheet of paper.

Ina continually reminds me of the awesome power of storytelling. You can talk all day about the importance of love, honor and respect for the traditions of your significant other, but Ina nails those concepts in her 200-word tale of a Jewish-Christian wedding at a hog farm.

At the same time, she demonstrates how vital interesting characters are to a story. In early drafts, the players are cardboard cut-outs, and it's fascinating to see how just a few words can add quirks, foibles and physical traits to a minor walk-on, making him a fleshed-out person about whom you could actually say, "I know that guy."

I've learned things from some of our drive-by critiquers as well. From the fellow who came once and vanished off the face of the earth, I learned the importance of finding the time to write, the time to edit, and the time to seek feedback.

A gal came once and ran screaming for the door, terrified by all those marks in the margins of her beloved creation. She reminded me of the reason I keep coming back - to get criticism. If I could achieve emotional distance and be able to recognize my mistakes and weaknesses, I wouldn't need the critique group.

But it's still a wonderful group, and I feel like there's a hole in my life when I'm forced to miss a session.

Next time: why Stuart isn't welcome back.

New Year, A New Start

Amazing how the New Year starts in the middle of winter, not a time we are easily motivated. Here in Montana, it's snowed every day for the past three weeks or so, and everybody's sick and tired of shoveling, slipping and sliding. Even when I lived in North Carolina, everything except the evergreens turned brown and drab. Why not start the New Year in the spring, when the signs of nature's rebirth are all around us?

Maybe renewal isn't supposed to be easy. It certainly seems harder gluing my rear end in a chair to write this time of year. Maybe maybe maybe...

Maybe it takes someone smarter than me to make sense of this. After all, instead of having brunch with Trump, Grisham and Obama today, I was out buying off-season clothing at yellow-tag, seventy-percent-off sales. So take my advice with a healthy dose of salt - the words of another struggling writer who sees the flaws of others a lot clearer than my own.

So, so New Years Resolutions for authors, poets and illustrators:

1. Keep a couple projects going. It's natural to hit a wall now and then so instead of beating it with your head, turn to researching a future story, or editing that junk you wrote a couple years ago, or working on family history. You'd be surprised how life delivers answers when you're looking in another direction.

2. Hang out with other writers. Join a local author's group, attend workshops, sign up for courses to improve your craft, attend readings by local writers and poets, go to book store signings, and watch newspapers for other events.

3. Join a critique group. This is the single best thing I ever did to improve my writing. We have members working on YA, a western, a memoir, a thriller, a humorous crime tale, and New Age sci-fi. But good writing is good writing, and recognizing it in others is the first step in incorporating it in mine. Also, I often don't see faults in my own prose until they're pointed out by others.

4. Find a time that works for you, and write every day at that time, even if only for 15-20 minutes. Putting new words on blank paper is priority one. Editing, researching and designing the dust cover can wait.

5. Read. A lot. For enjoyment and for insight into improving your craft. If you are struggling with dialog, read some Robert B. Parker, Elmore Leonard or Dixon Rice. Seriously.

Have a happy New Year and keep on writing.

Opening Paragraph III

So the opening of a book should capture the reader's attention and tease the imagination. A lot of us novice writers often strive to shock for the sake of being shocking, and agents/editors surely see plenty of death, dismemberment and debased sex in the samples that pummel them daily. There's probably a million different approaches you could take for the first few paragraphs, but I enjoy an author who creates the expectation of something i haven't seen before. Here's the first 7 lines of "The Unseen" by Montana scribe T.L. Hines:

Perched on top of the elevator, Lucas peered at the woman below and created an elaborate history in his mind.

Elevators and their shafts were easy places to hide. Easier than utility chases. Much easier than ductwork, popularly portrayed in movies as cavernous tunnels through which a man might crawl. Lucas knew better; most ductwork was tight and narrow, and not solid enough to hold 150 pounds.

I know a little about urgan explorers and creepy-crawlers who get a thrill from spying out secrets and riding elevators in office buildings. But this excerpt promises more - a character (possibly the protagonist) who makes up imaginary biographies about those he watches (stalks?). I just got this book for Christmas, so I'm not deep into it yet, but so far the writing lives up to the tease.

I hope my fan hasn't heen holding her breath waiting for my entry in Nathan Bransford's most excellent first-paragraph contest. Sometimes anticipation will whet the appetite, but there's only so much you can do with peanut butter and stale bread. Anyway, I've had an idea bouncing around in my cranium about a college-age dude with some geeky roomies who've logged copious hours of internet porn but don't know the first thing about women. The dude is something of a smooth operator, mostly because he genuinely enjoys being with attractive, funny, intelligent women. To do well at that pasttime, he's learned to pay attention to them and decipher the code behind some of the words and behaviors.

The dude realizes that there are hundreds of thousands of nerdy guys in the same situation as his roommates. A guy could get rich by videotaping pretty college girls talking about their preferences in men, dating and sex. Then splice in some soft porm that illustrates what the dude has learned, and, the trickiest part, find somebody to distribute the DVDs nationally. He recruits some beauties who are willing to talk about their sex lives if the pay is right, but has to deceive them about the commercial use he has in mind. Naturally, he falls for one of the girls, yada yada yada, then quits his lothario ways, and rides off into the sunset with the love of his life.

Well, that didn't turn out to be the one-sentence summary I'd envisioned. Following is the opening paragraph that hopefully hints at a shallow dude with possibilities and the future object of his affections. For emphasis, I've since split out a sentence in the middle as it's own paragraph, but it was originally spliced together as one fat stream-of-consciousness paragraph:

She sits on the other side of a small table littered with ashtrays and highballs, entrancing him the way her perfect features twist imperfectly as she talks. God knows she talks nonstop, pausing nano-momentarily to knock back some scotch and milk or puff on a Kool. Sometimes the tip of her tongue pokes out the corner of her mouth for no apparent reason, causing a tingle to run up his cock for no apparent reason.

Are they having A Moment?

Like two comets flirting with the same star though never colliding, they’d been hanging out at Jack’s and screwing their way through the denizens for a couple months. By now she knows his playbook. He suspects it’ll require honesty and spontaneity to nail her but he’s not sure it‘s worth the risk.

Have a wonderfull New Year, and keep on writing.

Opening Paragraph II

My previous rant was about literary agent Nathan Bransford's excellent search for the best first paragraph. My only disagreement with Nate's approach is that a paragraph is an artificial construct which readers don't pay much attention to. For example, if the book starts with dialog, the opening paragraph will be the bit of conversation from Character One, perhaps just a couple words. When Character Two speaks, or there is physical action by anybody but Character One, a new paragraph will start.

As readers, we don't automatically shut the book at the end of paragraph one, and either put it back on the shelf or carry it to the cash register. We browse for a while, maybe 15-20 lines of text, to see if it has any appeal. Sometimes that's all it takes - Grisham's "A Time to Kill" had me hooked from the first few lines - or sometimes it starts us flipping pages to see if whatever interested us can be found later on.

So that's the scientific test: does the prose intrigue us? Does it set up a dramatic or humorous situation, a unique character, or a fascinating locale? Does the author have a Voice that grabs us by the collar and won't let go? Is there some intangible quality to the writing style that we've admired in other books?

I'm going to push back my own feeble entry in Nate's contest, and instead inflict upon you the opening lines of my crime thriller, "Montana in Flames." I don't have enough emotional distance to know whether this is good or bad, but I've tried to intrigue the reader with an interesting locale, protagonist and situation.

Paul Longo eased his lanky frame into a chair at the New Accounts desk and waited for the statuesque blonde –- Elizabeth from her nametag -- to get off the phone. Her shimmering emerald dress clung to all the right places. Paul didn’t mind the wait.

He looked around the lobby. A small bank for a small town. Some of the windows had the bluish, dimpled look of antique glass. The pressed tin ceiling looked authentic, suggesting the building was a hundred years old or more.

The kid pushing through the copper-and-glass doors didn’t look the slightest bit authentic. A little guy, maybe five-foot-four and 130 pounds, who looked full of meth. Bulging eyes flicked nervously around the lobby, and one cheek twitched a furious beat. Still had prison pallor from his most recent stint. Both hands jammed deep in the pockets of a down vest, despite the unusual autumn heat.

Detective Paul Longo slipped the 44 caliber Super Redhawk from its shoulder holster and dangled it behind his chair. The end of its nearly ten-inch barrel touched the floor.

Opening Paragraph I

Yikes! I've been a bad, bad blogger, ignoring my responsibilities to my fan. It's been a crazy spring, summer and fall, full of soccer, college visits for my equally disorganized son, and lots of writing. Just not the blog type of writing. My novel is finally close to being sent out into the world, for better or worse, and I've been doodling with a lot on potential follow-up concepts.

Aside from my infamous "positive rejections," my critique group has been having successes. Jake has an agent for his western (and it is a western, Jake - it's got horses, gunslingers and a saloon) and Angie is having some of her books e-published. This is truly a profession where you never fail, as Dennis Foley says, but you can choose to give up.

While you're poking around my blog, be sure to check out the link to Nathan Bransford's blog, the most entertaining and educational one I've found on the business of publishing. Nate has recently been conducting his second "first paragraph" contest. Over a four-day period, any unpublished author could post the opening paragraph from a work in progress. By the time I got organized there were already over 1,100 entries, and 1,364 comments had been posted before the contest string was shut down. Some of the posts were deletions of accidental duplicates, and a few others were snarky comments or gratuitous sucking-up, but roughly 95% were actual submissions.

It was an eye-opening experience to scan the first 500 entries (poor Nathan had to personally read every single one to come up with his top six). There were a lot of romances, historicals, sci-fi and fantasies, YAs and crime stories. Not many tales for younger children, erotica and memoirs. Quite a few dead parents, failed relationship, and stumbling upon bloody corpses. Of the 500, I read about 30 that would've made me take the book straight to the cash register, and an equal number that would've had me flipping pages to see what the rest looked like.

Unfortunately, there was a lot of poorly-written crap, along with plenty of decent attempts marred by preventable flaws - misspellings, poor grammar and cluelessness about the meaning of "one paragraph only." Since I enjoy reading offbeat works, none of the topics made me squirm but some of the language was off-putting. Phrases such as "nether regions" and "anal leakage" spring to mind (although the latter would be a great name for a punk band, if such groups still exist).

Imagine your typical struggling editor or literary agent, forced to wade through knee-high garbage all day at work, then dragging a stack of it home to pollute her home. What a thrill it must be to discover a writer who can actually tell a coherent stort with a flair for drama, humor or tension, an interesting voice, and some understanding of craft. Every day she receives unsolicited, handwritten manuscipts on lined paper. The agent or editor gets: phone calls about submissions that were mailed three days earlier; query letters on lavender, scented stationery with a photo of the author's children/cat/grandmother; and knick-knacks, boxes of candy and the occasional $5 bill in the hope these will entice her to look more kindly on the submission.

Well. My Old Year's Resolution is to not only dedicate myself to selfless blogging, but also to enrich the lives of agents and editors everywhere by submitting works that will bring smiles to their faces and a ka-ching to their bottom line.

Next blog: my thoughts on an opening few paragraphs, and what I submitted for Nathan's contest.

To all you authors out there, keep the faith and keep writing.

Technology Must Die!

So should the wannabe Famous Author query agents and editors by email or snail mail?

Do the results differ? Truth be told, I haven't been at this querying business long enough to tell. With about 30 queries out there flapping their wings on my behalf, only a half-dozen have come home to roost. My very first e-query flew back within 12 hours with a request for a partial MS. Omigawd, the future is bright. Grisham labored in obscurity for years, selling his first self-published novel out of the back of a station wagon at swap meets, and here I've struck gold with my first effort. Before shopping for a Mercedes, I thought it might be prudent to research my new best friend. Oops. Google came up dry. Other than the brief entry on First Writer that led me to him in the first place, I found nada on the usual literary agent databases. I emailed Mystery Agent to see if I should send the partial by email attachment or snail mail, and also politely asked whether he had a website or blog. Since then, silence reigns.

My first query, and I get VaporAgent.

By the way, check out the link to Lit Agent X for actual examples of wacky, clueless queries that will make you feel incredibly smug.

The rejections I've received so far have all been professional and polite, usually along the line of "not for me" or "not a match." That's fine because I understand that this business is about art, not science.

Sometimes I have the same reaction as a reader. I had heard good things about Middlesex by Eugenides and grabbed it off a bargain table at Borders. I fought my way through the first 20 pages before giving up. Just "not for me," despite what Oprah thinks. I'd also heard about Spaceman Blues: A Love Song - supposedly cutting edge, awesome prose. I tracked down the first chapter on the author's website and it blew me away. Absolutely for me.

But I've noticed that replies to e-queries tend to be very minimal and safely-worded, whereas those returning to my mailbox sometimes have more positive, even helpful comments scrawled on the letter. One snail mail rejection came back yesterday from a prominent NYC literary agent and actually had nearly 100 words of feedback - my synopsis was a "compelling presentation" and he couldn't see any obvious flaws, but didn't feel the necessary "connection" to take me as a client. Wow! (Why hadn't the girls back in high school let me down like that, instead of telling me to buzz off? Virginity would have been ever so much more palatable.) That rejection will keep me motivated for months to come. I'm thinking it's suitable for framing.

As I said, I'm still new to querying and with some of the most successful agents only accepting e-queries, maybe that's the best way to go. I admit to getting a minor tactile thrill from folding up an SASE and slipping it into another envelope along with a crisp piece of stationary with my brilliant, well-researched query. But I don't get creepy over it.

I have important reasons for dragging my query letters down to the post office and dropping them through a slot, reasons that have nothing to do with the odds of success or failure or helpful comments. Once a query is mailed, there is Hope for a period of time. That Hope helps me glue my butt to a chair and tap out more queries, rewrite my old nonsense, and create gawd-awful first drafts of future nonsense. The fact that there is no scientific or logical basis for this Hope is inconsequential. It's the best buzz I've gotten since I threw Jim Beam out the back door.

On the other hand, last night I emailed a carefully-crafted, well-researched query to an agent who's supposedly waiting breathlessly for a thriller to represent. The rejection showed up among my incoming emails before my morning coffee break today.

Technology must die!

Almost forgot - thanks for checking out this blog, and keep on writing.