Getting It Write: When your main character is a writer

In my new novel Death Troupe, the main character is a playwright. Creating such a role was a new experience for me, and I was surprised by how much work it turned out to be. I’ve read many novels in which the protagonist was some kind of writer (Stephen King’s The Shining, Misery, and ‘salem’s Lot, just to name three from a single author) and had always found the writer-as-character to be highly engaging. Making my playwright interesting wasn’t the hard part, of course; what was difficult was describing a fictitious writer’s creative process without simply restating my own.

When it comes to writing, I believe that whatever works for you works for you. It might work for someone else, but then again it might not. These platitudes are easy to say (and even to follow) in real life because we so seldom control how someone else crafts a story. It’s a very different thing, however, when we do have that control.

Death Troupe’s main character, Jack Glynn, doesn’t follow a standard routine in writing his plays. He’s the in-house playwright for a theater troupe that comes together once a year, each year in a different town, to perform a mystery play written specifically for that locale. As a result, Jack has to travel to that vicinity (in this case a place in the Adirondacks called Schuyler Mills) and develop the story as he gets to know the area and its people. He draws heavily on local history and tradition for this, but the troupe’s director provides his own overbearing input as the play is being developed.

Jack’s meetings with the director provide great opportunities for showcasing the brainstorming process, and they also convert what might have been his deadly-dull ruminations into a freewheeling dialogue. This is helpful, as a main character who is a writer could be expected to spend long periods of time alone with the work-in-progress. As mentioned above, Stephen King did this quite successfully with his imprisoned (and terrorized) novelist in Misery, but even so there is always a danger of boring the audience with long passages where the writer is mentally building the story.

Which is not to suggest that the writer-as-protagonist is necessarily boring—far from it. Because they don’t normally hold down a nine-to-five job, writer-characters are freed to spend the day (or night) as they see fit. The search for inspiration can take them to some highly interesting settings, and those settings can be the home of some very unusual personalities and events. Writers see the world through very different sets of eyes, and the writer-protagonist’s interpretation of those sights, personalities, and events can be both entertaining and revealing.

Even the act of writing need not necessarily take place in a quiet room with a single desk and chair anymore. The laptop and Wi-Fi have freed the artist to roam about at will, almost like Hemingway composing essays in his notebook as he sat in busy cafés. Putting the writer in the middle of things, even while creating, provides the opportunity for other characters to break up those long passages where the reader is inside the writer’s head. And that was where I discovered how to describe a fictitious character’s creative process so that it wasn’t just a repeat of my own: The shifting settings, and the information provided by various characters, drove the playwright’s imagination in such a multitude of directions that it assumed a life of its own. The involvement of the demanding director likewise sent the brainstorming down unexpected paths, as his personality and Jack Glynn’s are almost polar opposites.

Having stumbled across this technique for building someone else’s creative process, I was actually pulled along by it at various times. Jack Glynn’s emerging play itself became quite exciting, particularly when a period of seemingly useless effort bordering on writer’s block suddenly lurched into a full-blown creative spree:

. . . he now found himself in one of those exhilarating periods when he’d rather be writing than doing anything else. Things that made for a normal life—like a daily routine that followed the sun—took a back seat to times like these, and he exulted in that change because it served as proof that his writing was indeed the most important thing in his life. It wasn’t a conscious choice on his part, like deciding to repaint the bathroom or go buy the groceries, but an overarching reallocation of his existence that was as undeniable as breathing. Day turned into night, breakfast turned into dinner, and the laptop or the writing tablet beckoned even when he was asleep. He would often awake with a new idea—as if he’d merely been on a break and not unconscious—and he would see the empty seat before the desk not as his station in some pointless assembly line, but as the pilot’s seat in a ship that could go anywhere. (Death Troupe, 2011)

Perhaps that’s the best part of having a writer as the protagonist: Having followed that individual’s avocation ourselves, we identify with the character’s struggles as the story develops. We sympathize when the tale dead-ends, or a major rewrite becomes mandatory. And we beam with a shared pride when the final product comes together.

www.vincenthoneil.com

Blogs from Exile: Murder, Romance, Suspense, and Theater: My new nov...

Blogs from Exile: Murder, Romance, Suspense, and Theater: My new nov...: "Now available on Amazon: DEATH TROUPE by Vincent H. O’Neil (394 pages) The Jerome Barron Players have a problem. Their writer, Ryan Betancou..."

Murder, Romance, Suspense, and Theater: My new novel Death Troupe

Now available on Amazon:

DEATH TROUPE by Vincent H. O’Neil (394 pages)

The Jerome Barron Players have a problem. Their writer, Ryan Betancourt, has killed himself under mysterious circumstances and they need a replacement right away. The Players, unofficially known as Death Troupe, come together once a year to perform a high-end murder mystery play written specifically for that season’s host town. Their writer has to possess special talents, as there’s a wager involved: If the townspeople can correctly identify the murderer before the show’s final act, they don’t have to pay for the engagement. So far, no town has ever won the bet.

Enter Jack Glynn, original writer for the Barron Players. He and Ryan wrote two Death Troupe engagements before Ryan stole Jack’s girlfriend, lead actress Allison Green. Although Jack found fame in Hollywood after quitting the troupe, eccentric director Jerome Barron convinces him to return for one show: The upcoming engagement in the Adirondack town of Schuyler Mills.

It is only then that the troupe’s advance man, private investigator Wade Parker, tells Jack of the strange events which surrounded the group’s previous engagement in Red Bend, California. A local retiree killed himself a few days after the performance—an act Wade suspects was prompted by the storyline of Ryan’s final play. He also reveals that Ryan was greatly unnerved by anonymous third parties who had interfered with the group’s marquee clue distribution.

This is one of the unique features of Death Troupe: As the performance approaches, clues are sprinkled through the town in a variety of ways, from fake headstones bearing characters’ names to real players acting out their assigned roles. In Red Bend, a stranger pretending to be a troupe member had dropped clues that were surprisingly accurate, and Ryan had reacted badly to this—perhaps badly enough to kill himself.

Events take a sinister turn shortly after Jack arrives in the small, snow-covered village of Schuyler Mills. Someone leaves a bizarre arrangement of black roses and plastic skulls in his hotel room. Ryan’s missing notebook from the Red Bend engagement turns up, and it contains an alarming tale of psychological harassment. The people of Schuyler Mills are enthusiastic about Jack’s presence, but he knows that many of them, from the local community theater group to the town mayor, could have ulterior motives.

As the weeks go by, someone begins distributing clues that Jack doesn’t recognize, from a plastic head stuck in an ice-fishing hole to confidential information scrawled on a billboard. Reading Ryan’s notebook, Jack begins to fear that the same web that snared his old writing partner in Red Bend is being spun around him in Schuyler Mills.

http://www.vincenthoneil.com/

Release of new mystery theater-themed novel DEATH TROUPE

Release of new mystery theater-themed novel DEATH TROUPE

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/