Moments In Crime

Fictional worlds

A friend who used to sing with a rock band years ago said to me once that there were some songs she liked listening to but she'd never sing on stage. I thought it was a curious thing to say considering how great her voice was. She said that after years of performing she knew her range, and had grown to accept her limits. There were some songs that were simply unsuited for her voice. Her voice would never give them justice, she said, so she stayed away. Other people might think her rendering was okay, but she knew when she was straining.

I think that the same thing applies to many writers. There are some types of narratives that are beyond the limits of our experience. That doesn't mean that the stories are too complex for our capabilities, it means that our strengths don't lie in that direction. For some reason -- genetics, experiences, a combination -- some of us are better at short stories than novels, or maybe better at screenplays than plays. And then with the narratives themselves, some of us lean toward one genre -- which is probably the result of our reading experiences.

A couple nights ago on the Charlie Rose show, Edward Albee said that only when he wrote his first play did he feel like himself. He'd tried poetry, short stories and novels, but only after his first play did he feel that he'd done something in a way that no other person could do it. I like that. I also like that it was a feeling. Whether or not it was true that no other person could do it like him is beside the point, what's important is that he, Edward Albee, felt that this was true.

The artist's recognition of himself in his creation is essential. A writing teacher of mine used to say about some of the characters in my better stores, "Aha, I get the feeling you know these people. This is your world." I appreciated the compliment, but I didn't think I was trying very hard. The characters, the writing came too easy. I was too young to know that this was where my strengths were. Writing about the world I knew gave my stories a sturdiness and authenticity that I would never have achieved if I'd modeled my stories on someone else's experience, or on some other writer's stories. An actor said, and I'm forgetting who it is, that he quit writing when he realized that his stories were poor imitations of Hemingway's, that he was trying to be Hemingway.

A student asked me years ago, "Where do you get ideas from?" and I flubbed the answer. She left the room more puzzled, probably thinking writing was so mysterious she might never get the hang of it. If I could get that moment back, I'd say this: Think deeply about your life, your experiences, your obsessions and, most importantly, about the kinds of books you enjoy. Then take a deep breath to clear your mind, and sit down to write. Then rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, and I'll bet good money, that the result is going to look a lot like your world. You'll recognize some truths in there, and hopefully you'll be fortunate enough to feel in your bones that nobody else could have written that story but you.

Hit the concrete running

Like any book lover, browsing a book store is one of my favorite pastimes. Time melts when I'm cruising the aisles. I often leave without buying a thing, but after every visit, I'm struck by how many different writing voices there are, how many different styles of stories, how many different sounds there can be on the page. It's been said that there are no new stories, all the stories have been told. That might be true, but pick up any three books, even in the same genre, and read the first pages. You may find the differences striking -- in rhythm, sentence length, the level of diction, the size of the paragraphs, settings -- and these differences are what make stories novel.

Some writers have such distinctive styles that they spawn hordes of imitators, and for the beginning writer imitating them, that's not all bad. Who better to imitate than a published author with a fine style? But at some point, writers must pull away, stand apart with their own stories, and now we're entering the territory of self-knowledge. Cormac McCarthy once said in an interview that the dirty secret about writing books is that it comes from other books. Sure, but to what degree do you want your story resembling another story in sound, setting, characters and all the rest?

Sometimes when I'm having trouble with a story, when I think it's beginning to sound too literary, too artificial, I get up and walk around, wash some dishes, fold the clothes. I was cleaning out a drawer the other day during a break, and found all these objects I'd tossed in there over the years. An old Surefire flashlight. A multipurpose tool. Two Bic pens and a notepad. Foosballs. A box of .45 caliber bullets from way back when I used to go shooting with a friend. A small brass Buddha. A worn leather wallet. These objects were the stuff of my life. I dumped them on the bed and studied them and it occurred to me that I could write a story inspired by each one of them. Each object said something about me -- my interests, my obsessions, my tastes.

When I returned to my writing, it was predictably easier. I didn't get wrapped up in how my sentences sounded or what word was best in this or that spot, I just wrote. Smoothly. What happened was that I had stepped away from the page for a few minutes and reconnected with the concrete world. The flashlight. the bullets. The brass Buddha.

Writers do this unconsciously. We look up from our writing and gaze at the sun rays slanting into the room, then put our heads down and write a scene with sun rays slanting on the lovers' sheets. Hemingway said always put in the weather. My guess is that it was raining the day he wrote the final scene in which the protagonist says goodbye to his dead wife in the hospital room and walks back to his hotel in the rain.

When we sit down to write, I think it's good to also be aware of how the chair feels, of the sounds coming into the room, the smell of our shirts, the scuff marks that your son's skateboard made on the floor. These things are the stuff of your life. When you use them in your stories they can make the story more real to you and help make your story truly yours.

The Reason for Writing

A writer I know once said to me, and I'm paraphrasing, "When I was young I knew what kinds of stories people liked. I was positive if it had certain elements and was written in a lively way, most people would like it. Now, twenty years later, I can't tell you what sort of stories readers will like."

So I said, "Are you saying, you now know that you don't know."

"That's it exactly. Now I write to find out what happens and I write to find out how to make the story work so readers will like it."

I wished I'd listened better. I had to discover the painful way, by having a surefire hit of a story, a story I just knew any reader would go gaga over, collapse in the middle. And it usually happened because I knew too much when I started. Sometimes it was a matter of not giving the plot enough thought and then finding out that story just wasn't going to work. But most times it was simply that I plotted too much only to watch the dialogue become stiff and the plotting contrived. And then I'd get bored, frustrated, and give up.

If the writer isn't having fun, chances are the reader won't either. People read stories basically to learn something, to find out what's going to happen next. It's a discovery, but it should also be a discovery for the writer. Here's something I've been seeing in my head. It's dawn on a fog-shrouded field. Two well-dressed men are in the middle of the field. One of them is digging a hole. He stops to rest, and the other man hands him a bottle of whiskey to drink, then takes the shovel. They take turns digging and swigging whiskey, not saying a word. Soon, it becomes clear that they're digging a grave.

But a grave for whom? And who are these men? Why are they out in this desolate field so early?

Right now, I don't know. But I intend to find out, and I'll write that story in order to find out what happens next. Before I can tell anyone else the story, I've got to tell myself first. I've got to surprise myself, entertain myself first. Maybe I'll need to know more elements of the plot, maybe not. But I'll discover that soon enough, as soon as I start writing.

The challenge of settings

In the Heat comes out on June 10th, and a few days afterward I'm scheduled to give a reading in Belize City, where the story is set. The story opens with the protagonist, Miles Young, walking along the city streets on the way to his comeback fight. One line reads, "When he turned the corner at Government House, that stately white mansion behind the wrought-iron fence where the British governors used to live, he was filled with pride, though he couldn't have cared less about history..."

This reading will be the first for the book. And where will it be? By sheer coincidence, at Government House. Belize is no longer a British colony, and Government House is now called the House of Culture, but the building still has a lot of its charm, old colonial architecture on an expanse of lawn. I understand it's also a pretty cool place to give a reading so I'll take pleasure in the coincidence and everything else about the moment.

I expect, however, that one thing won't be as sweet, and that's the reaction from a few people when they hear some of the Belizean patois spoken by some of the characters. Oh, they may find the dialogue interesting, and they may even smile or nod, but for these people, the patois won't sound real. And they'll probably tell me so.

This has been one challenge of writing a book set in a place where the English of the characters is distinctly unlike the English of most readers. If I had written dialogue in patois, it would be unreadable to some nonspeakers and would slow the story considerably. The solution was to leaven the dialect with informal English, to smooth out its rough patches so that it keeps the rhythm and flavor of the Caribbean, but is understandable and easy to read. I once spoke to a writer from Alabama who was working on a novel set in a small town in the South, and he said that his biggest challenge was to render truthfully the thoughts of his character without upsetting the words with standard English. He wanted to be faithful to the region, to get the sound right but still be readable, and he was finding the balance hard to achieve. I had this conversation years before I began writing In the Heat, and though I understood his difficulty, now I really understand it.

Setting a story in unfamiliar regions can offer a reader discoveries beyond the solving of the mystery. What is the culture like? How do the people live? For some people it may be like taking a trip (which is what good fiction should grant), but there are some who prefer the familiar. They want to read about picking up fries at the McDonalds drive-through, they want to see people they recognize walking suburbs they recognize, people like them. I once recommended a book set in Africa to a friend who was seeking a good mystery, and she frowned and said, "Naw, not right now, I'm tired of going to other places. I want to read a book set here, in the States."

I'm tired of going to other places. How could I argue with that? But if you believe that good books are about characters, then maybe the setting shouldn't matter too much. But I guess, it's our prerogative to take the literary journeys we want.

So settings and dialect present a challenge to readers, too. Readers must decipher the sounds of unfamiliar places, while puzzling over mysteries, without getting lost along the way. And if the writer has met his challenge, then the readers' efforts will be rewarded. At risk of sounding like a lit teacher, settings when well-rendered reveal something that we all know deep down: People are essentially the same; characters, no matter where they live or how they speak, want the same thing -- happiness. How and where they achieve it is what often makes the story interesting.

Writing voice

Let me be one hundred percent honest about what's running through my head. I like the idea of blogging on a web site dedicated to crime fiction, I am flattered to have been invited, and I'm proud to be associated with the fine crime writing practitioners on Moments in Crime, but I have no stinking idea how to blog without writing about myself. I hate writing about myself.

Now, this isn't false modesty -- or I certainly hope it's not -- but this is a sentiment borne, I'm pretty sure, from years and years of writing bad, thinly-veiled autobiographical short stories. And, yes, just about every writer I know has wallowed through such muck, and some have stumbled out on the other side with solid stories in hand. Not me. Today I cringe when I read some of the stuff I wrote ten, fifteen years ago. Some were in the first person, many weren't, but they all had that self-conscious preciousness that is the bane of so many young writers.

When I sat down to write In the Heat, I still hadn't shed all my earlier tendencies, although I thought I had, and about fifty pages in, I started picking up that scent that wafts of the pages of a writer who is overwriting a story instead of telling it. So I started over. It wasn't hard; it didn't require any great resolve or courage or ruthlessness, it was simply the case of a writer who was sick and tired of listening to the sound of his own voice.

So I asked myself, Who are these characters you're writing about? If you were having a conversation with them, what would they want to talk about? What's their level of education? And then I thought about the answers and wrote their story. I stepped out of the way -- or, as some of them would say, outta the way -- and I wrote. Nothing new there. Master crime writers have set good examples, and I'm thinking specifically about Elmore Leonard and George V. Higgins. What I did find refreshing was how deeply my characters' voices seeped into the exposition. Sure, dialogue was theirs, but I found that exposition moved the narrative along crisply if it carried the same rhythm and swagger of some of characters' voices.

Novels can take you deeper into inner lives of characters than any kinds of narrative. Writers know this, of course, but sometimes we lose sight of it. We come to the page brimming with story ideas, educated by MFA's, inspired by all the novels we've read and then we sit down to write drivel. Why is that? Why is it so hard sometimes to write honest stories, stories in which characters sound like real people?

Maybe the way we're educated about literature misleads us. After all those high school and college courses, maybe we tend to think that literature is more about language and analysis than it is about story. Maybe our education seduces us into believing that the language of the masters, or so-called masters, the language of the prize winners, is Good Writing, writing that should be emulated.

What I have learned is this: All writing is artifice, and telling stories can be energized by exploiting this artifice, loosening the collars of English prose, the sentence structure that can be so beautiful but so restrictive; by throwing everyday language into the mix, the language of characters. By simply letting the story sound like something you might hear in a bar or at the water cooler, and not like something that comes out of the mouth of some college professor with pipe and tweed jacket.

Blogging This Week: Ian Vasquez

 

Ian Vasquez, an avid boxing fan and a copyeditor at the St. Petersburg Times, received his MFA while working on a psychiatric ward and counseling at-risk high school students. Raised in Belize, he lives near Tampa Bay, Florida. This is his first novel.

In the tradition of Dennis Lehane and James W. Hall comes a new writer with a voice all his own.  Miles Young thinks he’s got one more shot in him before it’ll be time to hang up the boxing gloves for good. He does enjoy the notoriety his career has brought him at home, in the tiny Central American nation of Belize, but he’s also worried about how he’ll support his daughter on his own once it's over.  So when promoter Manny Marchand comes to him with a proposition for one last big fight, he listens. Isabelle Gilmore wants Miles to find her daughter, who’s run away with a bit of money and her no-good boyfriend just days before her 18th birthday. Isabelle’s afraid Rian’s going to marry this kid, only son of corrupt ex-police chief Marlon Tablada, and she wants Rian—and the money—found. Miles is reluctant, but Isabelle thinks hometown boy Miles can get people to talk in ways a real investigator can’t. And in return, the $30,000 payday for Manny’s big fight doesn’t sound bad either. But he quickly learns that there’s more going on than Isabelle let on, with Rian, with her, with Marlon and his boss, Arthur Rolle, a local bigshot.