The Mighty Tiny Tim -- in praise of the short story

NOTE: I wrote this blog at Christmas time last year, and was so pleased with how it turned out that I wanted to share it again this year:

The Mighty Tiny Tim

Recently, I had the good fortune to have two short stories included in anthologies. So when The Stiletto Gang (I have to work that name into one of my mystery novels) offered me the chance to guest blog for them, I decided to try and write something in praise of the short story.

Considering the season, I was not surprised when the image of Dickens’ Tiny Tim came to mind during my brainstorming. Not only is Tiny Tim short in stature, but he also employs a marvelous economy of words. “God bless us, every one!” is, I believe, his only line in A Christmas Carol and yet it sums up the story and its spirit quite nicely. It also ranks up there with “Bah, humbug!” as the most memorable line of that Christmas classic.

Tiny Tim’s kind of pithiness is an absolute must in short story writing, where the dreaded word limit sometimes suggests that we might have to sacrifice important elements. While it’s true that we don’t have a limitless number of pages for things such as character development, this in no way lets us off the hook. Just as Tiny Tim manages to cap Scrooge’s long night using only a few words, in the writing of short stories we have to look for more concise methods of communicating our ideas and information.

Although it’s taken from the world of theater, here’s an example of how a few actions and limited dialogue can yield a big result: On stage, a young woman is nervously hosting her father-in-law, who has dropped by the newlyweds’ apartment unannounced. The young woman offers the father-in-law some coffee, and leaves him in the living room while she goes into the kitchen. As soon as she’s gone, the father-in-law quickly and efficiently goes through the newlyweds’ mail, which was sitting on the table in front of him. He puts the letters and bills back in exactly the same place just before she returns, and is sitting there as if he’d done nothing in her absence.

The director providing this example described it as an efficient way of getting the audience to ponder many different possibilities regarding the character of the father-in-law. Is he merely a snoop, or is he worried about the young couple’s finances? Is there something in his son’s background that prompts him to be watchful? And why is he so good at snooping in the first place? All of these ideas and questions were conjured up in the minds of the audience by a few actions on stage, just like the space-saving devices we use when writing short stories.

To continue the topic of brevity, one of my instructors at The Fletcher School was noted for the pithiness of his class lectures. Commenting on that topic, he once said, “If you want me to speak for five minutes, I’ll need a week to prepare. If you want me to speak for a half an hour, I’ll need a day. And if you want me to speak for an hour, I’m ready right now.”

This was a comment on the demanding taskmaster that is brevity. In a seeming contradiction, it can take longer (and involve more work) to communicate your point in a single sentence than by using several paragraphs. It was also an observation that bamboozling an audience for an hour requires little preparation, while doing the same thing in five minutes is almost impossible. The requirement to organize our thoughts, and then express them succinctly in a convincing presentation of short duration, can be a very difficult task indeed.

And that’s why I like short stories. They’re the literary equivalent of the five-minute speech that takes so long to prepare—but hits the nail directly on the head.

Just like the mighty Tiny Tim. God bless us, everyone.

http://www.vincenthoneil.com/

Some ideas for managing the holiday season

I thought I’d shift away from the topics of writing and reading in order to share some methods for managing the holidays. Whether you’re prone to the seasonal blues or just have too much to do, here are a few techniques I’ve used in the past for managing stress, workloads, and minor-to-major annoyances:

1. Give yourself a break

This technique can take many forms, from short time-outs to longer approaches. The most important thing to do in this method is: Identify What’s Stressing You. Once you do that, you’ll be able to find ways to keep those bothersome things (or people) from getting too much on your nerves. For example:

If you’re feeling a lot of pressure from the too-many things you have to do, make a list of the actual tasks instead of viewing them as an unmanageable whole. Instead of seeing your big holiday party as a giant project, break it down into smaller categories such as invitations, food, beverages, and decorations. Instead of dreading all the gift shopping you have to do, write out the list of the actual items you need to go get. This obviously doesn’t lessen the amount of work you have to do, but it allows you to see that the insurmountable obstacle is actually made up of smaller (and easier) tasks.

Once you get going on these chores, don’t forget to continue giving yourself a break. Lock the gifts you’ve already bought in your car (concealed, of course) and then get a snack or a coffee before moving on to the next store. While you’re doing that, take a moment to look at the decorations. This is a festive time—let it be enjoyable for you.

As a minor caveat to the above, some people are more goal-oriented than others. I’m one of those people, and so I only start to feel better about a big project once I’ve tackled a significant part of it. If you know that will lower your stress, then go with it. Check off a bunch of the boxes on the To-Do list—and then take a break.

2. Turn down the negativity

These are trying times for many of us, even without the holidays, and we are surrounded in our everyday lives by reminders of how bad things are. In a maneuver closely related to Giving Yourself a Break, recognize the value of temporarily shutting out some of the negativity in your life. For example:

It’s okay to miss the news from time to time. This isn’t a recommendation for sticking your head in the sand or slipping into a fantasy world, but it is a strong suggestion that being bombarded with dire warnings about the economy, the environment, and just about everything else can be very stressful—and to no immediate purpose. Many of the doomsayers on the news have an agenda that only involves your vote or your wallet, so you can turn them off for a while without missing much. If something big happens, you’ll hear about it without turning on the TV or the radio or the computer.

If the negativity in your life comes from a different source, apply the same principle and try to control your exposure to it. So if you have a relative, friend, or coworker who brings you down, you don’t have to shut them out completely—just limit their opportunities to ruin your spirits. This can be as easy as mentally setting the time when you’re going to politely end the conversation, or as involved as including more upbeat people in the event where the downer is present.

3. Lift your spirits

The first two techniques listed above involved the reduction of negative influences, but that’s actually a negative approach itself. So I’d like to finish by suggesting that you try something positive. Identify events, books, movies, music, or anything else that makes you happy this time of year. Once you’ve found a few of these, add them to your life somewhere in the next few weeks. Revive that family tradition, rent that beloved movie, or pop that CD of Christmas carols into the player.

If you can’t identify anything that’s lifted your spirits in the past, look for something new that might give you a boost. Every town website (or local library) has some kind of ‘Calendar of Events’ listing, and many of these events are free. Some of them may even allow you to do some volunteer work, which is also a good way for most of us to improve our moods. Whether it’s walking through the town common to see the Christmas lights or helping to wrap presents for the less fortunate, there are plenty of activities out there that can put a nice seasonal spring in your step.

Even if that doesn’t work, take a page out of Scarlet O’Hara’s book and remember that tomorrow is always another day, with just as much chance that things will be better as that they will be worse. We’re closing out the year 2010, and there’s nothing wrong with feeling optimistic just because a new year is beginning.

I hope you’ve found these ideas helpful. I want to wish all of you a Merry Christmas, a joyous holiday season, and great good luck in the coming year.

http://www.vincenthoneil.com/

Starting your mystery novel can be murder

One of the great things about being an author is that I get to meet so many talented writers, both published and not-yet-published. We ask each other everything under the sun, but one of the most common questions in the mystery genre is how to begin plotting the story. Murder mysteries aren’t like most other tales of fiction because they almost always contain the additional element of an investigation that has to make some kind of logical sense. Many murder mysteries provide clues for the readers so that they can guess who the killer is, and those clues have to make sense as well. As if that’s not enough, the mystery has to be sufficiently difficult (or interesting) to hold the reader’s attention. So where does the plotting of such a tale begin?

Every writer has a different way of doing things, so this blog will only suggest a few. If the ideas presented here sound valid, please feel free to give them a try. If not, please round-file them; after all, writing is a very individual thing and what works for one writer may not work at all for another. Additionally, this is a blog about how to begin plotting the basic concept or outline of a mystery tale and so it shouldn’t be confused with the actual opening or first lines of that book, which is a different topic altogether.

One place to start your plotting is the investigator. This is a good technique because it automatically directs the story in one of two different directions: Amateur or professional. If the investigator is a professional, his or her involvement in a murder probe needs little explanation. If the investigator is an amateur, the question of why they’re looking into this particular killing probably requires an answer. Plotting that begins with the investigator can also lend itself to a more character-driven piece, particularly if the individual(s) looking into the killing are the story’s main focus.

Not all novels are character-driven, however. In a more thematic approach, the author might begin by choosing some ideas or topics to thread into the storyline. For example, if you’d like your story to suggest that the forces of law and order are just as crooked as your outrightly criminal characters, special attention might be required in choosing the setting and circumstances of the murder and its investigation. After all, there really is a reason so many great noir mysteries are set in big cities with authority-hating gumshoes as main characters.

As for me, I prefer to start my plotting with the murder itself. This approach makes me identify the motive for the killing early in the process, but that’s all right. Knowing the motive right from the start allows the writer to get into the killer’s mind that much faster, and it also raises the issue of how the killer might keep that motive from being discovered.

Starting with the murder itself often leads to two important ways the killer can be found out: What (if anything) they did to prepare for the act, and what steps they took to hide their involvement once the deed was done. This thought process also separates the murder into two categories: Premeditated and not premeditated.

In the case of the planned murder, the perpetrator might have done many things to get ready, or to create the circumstances where the killing took place. An investigator finding evidence of those acts (indications that someone had been following the victim, for example) has at least uncovered evidence suggesting that this was in fact a murder. Further digging into those preparatory movements can cross potential suspects off the list (unless, of course, the killer wasn’t working alone) and even lead to uncovering the murderer. Regardless of the level of preparation, the killer might also have left vital clues in an attempt to cover his or her tracks.

Which leads us to the unplanned killing. Despite the absence of preparation, there are still possible clues prior to the spur-of-the-moment murder. Motive can be one of them, as the individual who suddenly commits homicide usually has an overwhelming reason to do so—often recognizing, too late, just how obvious a suspect he or she might be. That, of course, would then prompt them to do something to get their names off that suspect list. Crafting an alibi (which can also create a conspirator-after-the-fact who may or may not hold that information over the killer) or pointing the authorities at someone else are just two of the many things the murderer might try. No matter what the perpetrator might do to hide his or her involvement, an investigator discovering those efforts would probably put the killer back on the suspect list—maybe at the very top.

Regardless of how you choose to begin plotting your story, a generic timeline can be a handy tool. In its most rudimentary form, this can be as simple as a piece of paper showing that the investigation starts sometime after the murder. Don’t laugh; pondering those two points in time can really get your plotting started. They raise interesting considerations such as whether or not there’s a dead body (otherwise this case might start out as a missing person, a potential kidnapping, or a simple runaway), if there are concrete indications that this was a murder (as opposed to a suicide or an accident), and just how much time has elapsed before the investigators became involved. Slowly filling in the events surrounding these two moments in time can be a very good way to start plotting your mystery.

Hopefully this didn’t sound like a series of yes / no items like choosing between first-person and third-person and deciding whether or not to tell the reader who the killer is. The point is that if you’re having trouble getting your mystery plotting started, going over these basic ideas can really get the brainstorming rolling. And once that happens, you’re on your way.

http://www.vincenthoneil.com/

When in doubt, tell the story

In writing, it’s not unusual to reach a spot where you don’t know how to continue—or even how to get started. That’s a scary feeling. Some people dread such moments as the onset of writers’ block, while others view them as a subconscious warning to slow down because they’re missing something.

In both cases, my advice is the same: Tell the story.

Someone a lot smarter than I am once told a writing group, “You’re not writers—you’re storytellers.” I come back to that aphorism a lot, because I think it’s brilliant. After all, so much of our writing is little more than a good cocktail-party story that someone took the time to write down.

It really is true: Think of a story you tell in small gatherings, one that almost always holds the attention of your audience or gets a good laugh at the end. Then think about how it would look on paper if someone recorded you and then transcribed the tale. It would probably come across quite well, and that shouldn’t be a surprise; after all, your cocktail-party story has an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. It’s shaped to go from the beginning to the middle to the end without losing the audience, and that ending is meant to have a certain effect. Speaking or writing, we are storytellers.

That goes for the non-fiction writers out there as well. The only difference is that your stories are real.

So whenever you’re casting about for what to do next in a project, or even wondering how to get started, follow this advice: Tell the story.

If you’ve already got something written down, your momentary pause could have many explanations: You wonder if what you’ve already written is on target. You suspect it needs something more—more detail, more description, more words. You fear you may have already painted yourself into a corner and don’t even know it yet.

All of the preceding questions are important, and if you have an answer for them (your first draft isn’t on target, the completed part of the work does need something, or you have boxed yourself in) then by all means fix them. But if you don’t have a solution for these issues (or if you’re not even sure they’re issues at all) then go ahead and keep telling the story. Ask yourself what comes next, and then write it.

Quite often, this practice will show that your earlier concerns aren’t terribly valid—or the new writing will render them moot. Think of those times when the writing of the story itself revealed the solution you couldn’t think of earlier, and keep telling the story. Consider just how much of a rough draft gets taken out later (French Connection director William Friedkin referred to such discarded material as ‘scaffolding’ because it wasn’t needed after the story he was building was completed) and keep scribbling. Continue to tell the story.

Remember, this isn’t an admonition to just go blindly charging ahead. You can’t continue telling the story if you don’t know it in the first place. It also doesn’t mean you have to figure everything out before you write it, or that you have to build the tale chronologically—far from it. One great advantage of the advice to “Tell the Story” is that it allows you to skip to a part that you know well enough to actually work on. It lets you accept the possibility that a segment you’ve already completed isn’t what it should be, but that you can leave it alone until you know how to fix it. It keeps the words appearing on the screen or the page.

It keeps you telling the story.

Just a little earlier, I mentioned that this advice can also help you get started when you’re not sure how to begin. That’s where the cocktail-party example comes back into play. There are many ways to begin a story, and you can make any of them work. But if you’re at a loss as to how to get started, try imagining yourself standing or sitting with a small group of people when a lull in the conversation occurs. How would you get their attention? What’s so interesting about your tale (or your point)? Should you start with an introduction, or just jump right into the action? Think of a few ways you might do this, and before you know it you’ll be off and running. 

You’ll be telling the story.

http://www.vincenthoneil.com/

When Your Characters Misbehave

The studio guy told me, “Kid, you have no future in this business.”

So I asked him, “Why?”

He said, “When Tony Curtis first walked onscreen carrying a bag of groceries—a bag of GROCERIES—you took one look at him and thought, THAT'S a movie star!”

So I asked, “Weren't you supposed to think, That's a grocery delivery boy?”

—Harrison Ford describing his first screen test

I like that anecdote for a lot of different reasons, and I usually cite it when another writer mentions the topic of characters who won’t behave. You’ve met these troublemakers: Minor players who insist on acting like major players, background performers who refuse to stay in the shadows, and the grocery boy character who’s supposed to walk in, set the bag down, and walk out—but he just . . . won’t . . . do it!

Unbelievable. Why won’t he do what he’s told? After all, he’s just a figment of my imagination. He wouldn’t exist on the page if my fingers weren’t typing out his every action. I’m the director and he’s the actor. He’s supposed to do what I say. He just doesn’t.

So instead of walking in, putting the bag down, and walking out, what does he do instead? He tracks in dirt that sparks my investigator’s memory about a crime scene. He trips over something on the floor that turns out to be a major clue. He makes a wise-guy comment that’s just too good to leave out. Or he walks in, puts down the bag, and walks out . . . but not before rolling his eyes at me.

The outright disobedience is tough to understand (I am, after all, typing the character’s every move) but easy to handle—either I incorporate the unexpected action and try to figure out where it leads, or I throw it out entirely. Believe it or not, it’s the eye roll that’s an actual challenge. As with any eye roll, my initial reaction is to ask, “What was that?” and sometimes that’s all there is . . . for a time. You see, the eye roll is usually an indication that I’ve missed an opportunity to tell the tale a little better and that I have not yet recognized it. In the case of the unexpected action, I subconsciously saw a different way to improve the story and the character simply went ahead and did it. But the eye rolling grocery clerk, though clearly exasperated by the uninspired things I’ve got him doing, doesn’t provide the answer right away.

Re-reading the lines that preceded this one, I have to wonder what a psychiatrist would make of all this. A writer claiming to be unable to control the very words he’s typing because the imaginary human being he’s created is calling the shots. There’s a horror movie on this topic involving an evil ventriloquist doll, and most audiences come away from that film believing the ventriloquist was nuts. Lord knows what a trained psychiatrist would say about that . . . or this.

But I digress. Back to the grocery clerk who actually does what he’s supposed to, but gives me silent attitude the whole way. It can take a little time, but the missed opportunity in that grocery delivery scene does reveal itself—sometimes in a stunning fashion. In some instances the revelation appears only after I’ve painted myself into a tight literary corner with no apparent way out—that is, until I see the change to the earlier scene that would drop everything back into place. 

There is a related experience where I’ve added subplots, characters, and even single lines to a story for no apparent reason. These tiny items come out of nowhere, and even as I type the words I’m almost certain I’ll eventually remove them as useless clutter. Later, sitting there in a corner of my own making, overcome with the scent of slow-drying paint, I suddenly realize the pointless piece of clutter included on a whim is the only—and sometimes perfect—way out. That’s what I mean by a stunning revelation.

The important secret that the grocery clerk obviously knew but wouldn’t share falls in the same category. There’s no way to explain it (even for the trained psychiatrist that I won’t be contacting) but it’s one of the great joys of writing: Unexpected inspiration that radically improves the story, unlikely coincidence that gets us out of that ugly corner, and unruly characters who sometimes take our writing to a whole new level.

So the next time your minor character starts talking like a major character, let her. The next time the opening car door allows a clue to fall unexpectedly onto the ground, pick it up and look at it. And the next time the delivery boy rolls his eyes, tell him you noticed—and that you’ll be happy to listen once he’s ready to drop the attitude and spit it out.

You’ll be glad you did. I always am.

Research and Writing: It’s not just the facts after all

I’ve been writing in various genres for some time now, but only recently came to appreciate the link between research and inspiration. Yes, I know; it was probably always there, but I hadn’t really given it much thought until just a few years ago.

Like so many former students, somewhere I got the impression that research merely put me in a position to start working on an idea, instead of helping me generate the idea itself. As a result, I had a definite ‘research’ phase, followed by a ‘brainstorming’ phase, and then the actual ‘writing’ phase. To me, research provided the backup for my non-fiction arguments and the framework for my fiction writing—and that was it.

Just a few years ago I began work on a mystery novel which became my first published book. I wrote that novel as an entry in the St. Martin’s Press “Malice Domestic” competition, and so I already had a few bare-bones requirements stipulated by the competition sponsors. Chief among these was the specification that my sleuth had to be an amateur, which pointed out a real deficiency in my knowledge base. Despite having read almost every book in Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe series and having watched just about every detective show ever put on TV, I knew next to nothing about the investigations business—amateur or otherwise. So I went and got the most basic primers on the subject and read them, believing that I’d jot down the concrete facts, shut the books, and then start my brainstorming.

Luckily I was wrong. The books I’d selected quickly took me in hand by explaining the things that private investigators do and, more importantly, the things they don’t do. They listed the requirements for being licensed as an investigator (which, depending on the state granting the license, can be extensive) and then described some of the many other skills the job can sometimes require (such as mining data from the Internet and videotaping in the dark). Along with this, my reading revealed that the investigations industry contains many people who aren’t licensed PIs: These secondary actors conduct background checks, create scripts for videotaped evidence presentations, gather pertinent court documents, and perform many other important duties.

Instead of being relegated to my notes, much of this new information helped me create my main character, fact-checker Frank Cole. His supporting role in the investigations business still qualified him as an amateur, and his work as a fact- and background-checker even suggested that he could have come from the computer world. This thought nudged me toward making him a software developer who had fallen on hard times (the book was written in 2004, well before our current economic situation) who then relocated to the small town of Exile, Florida. Not long after that, Murder in Exile took rough shape as an outline—thanks in large part to my new appreciation for the role of research in generating ideas.

My most recent project involves a high-end murder mystery theater troupe, and once again I knew next to nothing about the main topic, which was the theater world. Knowing this, I began my study of this new environment with the most basic books on how to stage amateur theatricals. This time, however, the effect of the research wasn’t restricted to the novel I planned to write. Not surprisingly, given the topic, it began to improve both my writing and my storytelling.

For example, I became modestly familiar with the physical properties of the stage and the ways in which actors direct the audience’s attention toward or away from events happening right in front of them. Although there are too many of these techniques to mention, I was now exposed to the idea of punctuating important spoken lines with some kind of action, or drawing attention to a character by contrasting his or her wardrobe with the nearest costumes and the stage’s background. Working these techniques into my new book, my dialogue passages soon began packing more punch than they had before—and they became much livelier too.

Reading up on how actors prepare for a role, I saw a link between the creation of characters in a novel and their development on the stage. For example, some actors will create a biographical sketch of the role they are playing in much the same way that authors build a character’s back story. This in-depth analysis of a role is highly beneficial, as it can help actors to detect those moments in the script where they are being asked to act or react in a way that doesn’t match their character’s personality. Authors can take advantage of this technique as well, to ensure that they don’t make this mistake—writing something that takes one of their creations ‘out of character’, so to speak.

Having touched on the basics of stage management and character preparation, I then read the memoirs of several Broadway directors and was pleasantly struck by the similarity between directors and authors (many of those directors would disagree with me here). In both cases, the director or the writer provides a vision for how the story is to unfold, interprets the tale, and then selects various ways to tell it. The director is of course working with live people trained in their art, and so there is often a great deal of collaboration in theater. Strangely enough, I’ve encountered a similar relationship with some of my characters—people who exist only on the page who, nonetheless, still argue with me about how I’m portraying them. And like the directors conferring with—and sometimes deferring to—their actors, more often than not I’ll eventually listen to the stubborn character I’ve created who just won’t do what I ask. It’s amazing how many times these non-existent people are right.

It’s been an interesting journey, going from student-trying-to-finish-his-paper-on-time to someone who appreciates the inspiration and direction that can come from basic research. At the very least it’s taught me to slow down enough to notice when some new piece of information holds a potentially useful suggestion for my story—and to understand that there is no such thing as the ‘research’ phase of writing a book. There is only an ongoing effort to learn more about the topic, which may not even end when the project is completed.

http://www.vincenthoneil.com/

Motivating Your Murderer

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The Mighty Tiny Tim -- in praise of the short story

Originally posted on The Stiletto Gang's website on December 16, 2009:

Recently, I had the good fortune to have two short stories included in anthologies. So when The Stiletto Gang (I have to work that name into one of my mystery novels) offered me the chance to guest blog for them, I decided to try and

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