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We finally manipulate our character into the deep morass that could be her demise…ratchet up the senses, the sound effects, the atmosphere, the creepiness when suddenly she fumbles for but of course drops the cell phone she’s reached for so as to call for backup or help or hubby. Sometimes the darndest things happen at the most inconvenient of moments in the story—just like real life sometimes. There have been grumblings among readers about characters misuse of this, that, or the other gizmo in mysteries of late. Mysteries have always incorporated the latest in technology and sometimes even employ science fiction when the story calls for a device not yet invented but needed to move the story along. Does it make sense? Is it playing fair with the reader? It likely depends on the reader and the number of times a device has not worked or worked to save a protagonist in the nick of time.

I have always worked to incorporate current gadgets, gizmos, and technology in my stories; in one I made a case for any nutcase with a PC can set himself up as a Religion of the ONE—and like facebook and twitter, wow, the nutcase gets followers. What easy prey are our young. I have had serial killers logging in, setting up websites, enticing victims. Technology as a means to evil ends. But I have also kept up with police science, forensics, the cutting edge means to good ends.

In Absolute Instinct for instance, I had Dr. Jessica Coran use a cell phone with a built in live GPS camera pinpoint her whereabouts when the killer and Coran face off in the final scene. But this is nothing new as in my first published novel, SubZero, set in the distant future of 2010 was jam filled with interesting technology like a climate control wall unit to escape the stress of a new Ice Age as well as a nuclear powered building. This was a book published in 1969 and is today an ebook for Kindle readers.

A writer using technological marvels in his or her book must treat them like any other prop; they can’t just pop up and not be put to use, for instance—they should be in the scene for a reason, and that reason may come clear twenty chapters down the road. If you give a character a cane that also acted as a phone for instance, the cane-phone has a reason for being in the story to begin with. Rent the Kevin Bacon horror spoof film TREMORS to see an absolutely perfect use of props from a pogo stick to a pair of pliers and an old Coca Cola machine. Every prop, big and small, is in the “frame” for a reason and is put to use if not then and there then in an upcoming scene. Go see the new Holmes film for use of props introduced – almost to a one, every prop that pops up is put to use either then and there or in the next scene or the last scene, but it gets used and has a reason for being on hand. Some films are so heavily invested in current technology as part of the ongoing story as in Hackers. It had to use technology, but Holmes uses the technology of his day.

Techno gadgets can become a nuisance rather than a help, however, if you spend three, four, five pages discussing their inner workings; this is tedious and unnecessary. It is the downfall of most young people who want to write science fiction, some who write an entire scene just to explain how a machine works. Do any of us know how a microwave works? Do we need to in order to use the machine? If there is a reason for the reader to take a lesson on gamma rays? Ifffff so, by all means explain them but do so in dialogue and with characters engaged and in action. Never allow fat paragraphs to build up; never stop your story to describe a person, place, or

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The business of editing your story once you’ve got it going is an important consideration, and the first consideration is precisely WHEN do you do your editing; what is your best choice of processing the process? Do you edit as you go, line by line, or afterward altogether at once? I imagine some folks do it scene by scene, chapter by chapter as they go—which I do nowadays, but in my youth, I used to do my serious editing only AFTER the manuscript was completed and entirely out of my head. Some say you can’t do two jobs at once—create and edit—in the same breath as each job requires the opposite side of the brain, but as I have matured as a writer, I have come to discard that notion. I edit much more as I go nowadays than I once did, and I will consciously be editing a line as I write it, a scene as I write it, a chapter as I write it. I will also re-read and edit two or three scenes and chapters before I continue on to the next scenes and chapters, rather working in a parabola fashion, like a wave action, back and forth.

I won’t catch every misplaced modifier or weak metaphor or missing comma or apostrophe, but I know for a fact that I am too close to the trees to see the forest, or too close to the forest to see the trees, or both since like a client in a courtroom who represents himself, I have a fool for an editor. I know it needs a judicious second and even third eye; in fact, better than most, I know I need all the help I can get. To this end, I have cultivated close friends whose advice and editing eye are spot on—folks I can rely on. Such friends can drive you insane as they are so detail conscious, but they are, as I said, spot on.

I have seen errors in my finished books, however, and this after I have written and rewritten the story to exhaustion, and it has been vetted by my readers, and it has had a thorough going over by my editor and a copy editor as well, and guess what – still typos and words like Lamb for Lame filter in or are crammed in by the ink gremlins (creatures that abound in magazines, playbills, brochures, how-to’s, and novels). Still we try and try and try.

No novel in the history of novels has been rewritten more than my Children of Salem and yet my hero, Wakely gets spelled as Wakley at least once, and tomb should have been tome in the first chapter. So it goes, but we must strive to make the version that goes to an editor’s desk as clean and error-free as we can possibly make it, as this is a major part of the job at hand.

TEN items I edit for as I write (in fact both sides of the brain can work in tandem with experience)

1 - Edit for LY words and other modifiers, adjectives, adverbs to hug the word they ‘modify’.

2 - Edit to catch pronouns that are ‘fuzzy’ or confusing for whatever reason and in need of being replaced by naming the person, place, or thing the pronoun is standing in for. Constantly ask who are they…what is it…who is he/she.

3 – Edit out as many prepositions and prepositional phrases as possible as in switch: ‘stood up from the chair’ with ‘stood’ – and such phrases as ‘out of the back of the car’ with ‘from the car’ and excise so many sentences that unnecessarily end with ‘to me’. Anytime you can replace two or three prepositional or directional words with a single word that is a WIN.

4 – Omit as many of the word VERY as you can find along with many another qualifier in the narrative; look up the part of speech that is called a qualifier and avoid them like the plague; they are related to adjectives, adverbs, and modifiers and are o

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The subject on my mind this day is what happens when we stop to think about the hard face of reality in questioning our birth, our beginning, our personal GO on the Monopoly board of life? Gawd but that is an awful metaphor….life as a monopoly game, and yet had I paid a good deal more attention as a child to the absolute truth of it—how to crush others and become a profit-driven human being in the process, perhaps I would have a good deal more money in the bank today; might own a property or two, charge rent, get that extra income and ignore my renters when they call about the busted widgets.

Can you guess that I was the kid in the family of five who always stank at Monopoly and Parcheesi and other cut throat games like Sorry? That I spent a lot of time in jail? That I loaned money to my little sister when she was completely depleted of the green stuff? I lost a checkers too. I lost at Chess. I was a born loser, and I can recall as a child feeling sorry when watching baseball or tennis or football or Roller Derby Queens because I hated the thought that someone must lose—one player or one side wins, the other loses. The only sport I didn’t feel so bad about was golf as I could see no clear sides; it was every man for himself and amid the ensemble anyone could win but the loser could not be pinpointed so clearly as when two opposing teams hit the field of battle.

I was born with such empathy in fact that when someone—a school bully or gang member—decided to wail on me, I’d pick up the stick with the nail at its end to defend myself yet I couldn’t bring myself to use it, as I could imagine the pain it would inflict. I could feel it and see the blood gush before it gushed. As result, I soon learned the only way I could win a fight was with my mouth, with words. So that was my initiation into the power of words—make ‘em laugh and walk away. Not that I didn’t also learn to ingratiate myself with the biggest kid in class, help him with his homework, and enlist him as my bodyguard. It’s how I survived Skinner Elementary, later Carpenter Junior High, and still later H.G. Wells High as I called Wells High, inner city Chicago.

This was the fifties and sixties, a rough place to be born and raised, but I hadn’t been born in Chicago, so I fought it the entire time growing up. I was born in Corinth, MS and some of my siblings in Tuskegee, AL. Mom from Alabama, Dad from Mississippi. so I learned how to spell these magical faraway places with their strange-sounding names, and I dreamed of escape from Chicago, and a couple of times I tried, once with plans to escape with a friend to his hometown of Hazard, KY. Finally, I got on a train and did escape midway through my high school years, winding up in hardscrabble, tiny Screven, Georgia. I climbed into life with my cousins, my wonderful Aunt Sadie and equally wonderful Uncle John and a lifestyle totally remote. Still, their home was a haven, a place to heal for as long as I wanted. It was a new beginning and in their home, listening daily to my cousin Dennis’ drawl and Deep South accent, I decided to create my first novel using his voice and basing the character on Dennis Hodges. It became Daniel Webster Jackson & The Wrongway Railroad, a mix of homage to my spiritual mentor and hero, Mark Twain, and an historical novel about the Underground Railroad.

Talk about Beginnings…it began as an exercise I set for myself to see if I could write one page and pull off sounding like Mark Twain…but one page evolved into a scene, and soon I realized it was not going to let me off so easily. It became a chapter, and what happens when you write a first chapter? Of course it begs for the second, and the second the third, and so on. Just as Twain’s tale of Huck Finn is episodic, I followed the episodic method I had learned from reading Dumas, Doyle, Dickens, Stevenson, Hawthorn, Poe, and of course The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. In fact, the entire idea came about when I went searching for the third in Twain’s boys’ adventure “series” and learned there was none. Unable to accept or believe it, and armed with the arrogance of youth—what is more powerful? Youth being what it is, I sat down to determine if I could write that third book which Twain had simply failed to produce.

And people wonder why I love writing historical fiction, why I turned from doing serial killers to my Chicago Inspector Alastair Ransom trilogy and more recently Children of Salem, “love in the time of the witch trials”. Here is the answer: From time to time, I remind myself of my reasons for getting into writing fiction—my passion for it, why it sustains me more than winning awards or passing Go or making a bundle of money or hobnobbing with Matt Lauer or Ms. Oprah. I remind myself that “in the beginning” I wrote for the sheer love of putting words, sentences, paragraphs, scenes, and chapters down to see—to literally SEE—on paper what I had already spilled over in my mind. I face it— nothing else I do on the planet pleases me more than the precisely NAILED down images, dialogue, setting, plot, character with all the accoutrements…and to see it all come alive and dance from my head to my fingers to the page or rather the stage which the page represents. I adopted the novel? Well yes, but it also adopted me. Here was something that from the outset I was in charge of; here I rigged the game, made the rules, and won every race, fight! Every Monopoly game I laid out. Here I could be as slick, elusive, and deadly as a James Bond or as filled with as much joy as a Civil War vet who has managed to save one of his legs!

Endings in life and in fiction need be as perfect as we can make them, and while I am not contemplating ever ending my writing career—“You will have to rip my cold dead hand from this computer!”—I do continue to believe that there’s a reason beyond the pettiness of making a “killing” in the “writing game or casino” (it’s hardly a business like you find in Monopoly, this crazy roulette wheel we call publishing with its inherent defibs and heart murmurs and cardiac arrests; it’s only a business if you have a shtick or a TV or film tie-in, then you are welcomed into the board room end of things and only then.).

My own writing middle years have been a roller-coaster to say the least. One step forward, three back, and the “game” is never won-won, and one can never make enough money to satisfy the needs of home and ego if a midlist author. No your life is far closer to Van Gogh’s than the commercial artists whose fifteen minutes of fame net them large dividends. You write for food on table and to feed spirit. In my case, I keep reminding myself again and again what were my passions as a young, starry-eyed wanna-be newbie author, the kid whose first rejection came from Scholastic? What did the kid want? Where is the kid now? Is he worth unearthing to tackle yet another project? Can his passions be revived? Can the curious, easily fascinated kid be got at and the cranky, jaded, cantankerous old veteran be controlled so the kid can get back in the ring to fight another day?

Well sure he can and damn right! The eternal optimist, the eternal seeker. That’s what a writer is despite all his innate and deserved skepticism and cynicism about the playing field in publishing and in the broad world that Shakespeare warns us so often about—the one filled with slings and arrows; the one that overtakes us all at times, and in the end we are left with what? —two dates on a tombstone with a dash between. It is what we do with the time that this dash represents that is most important. Getting back to one’s inner child, one’s roots, one’s early powerful passions, and dealing with where one is at this moment—in the NOW—and determining a good outcome—an ending one can live with…these are all such important and huge questions to ponder and come to terms with. Wax and wane.

When I was at my deepest, darkest depression as a young unpubbed author the fear I would never be a published author controlled me and my work! Finally, I asked myself one question: Will you write if you never see publication ever? Will you continue to write? I answered that question and in doing so I got the monkey off my back and lightened up and soon began publishing even though my answer was YES as a conviction that I would NEVER see publication. Does it make sense? Now I am a goodly bit older and one might imagine wiser, and guess what question I am asking myself nowadays?

Yes, same question, same answer. I am what I am, as Popeye so oft said.

Re-invent yourself as often as necessary to sustain yourself as a writer but never forget why you took up the pen to begin with. I will shut up on that note.

Happy Writing Everyone – see you at the Kindle Store, Digital-Bookshop, Smashwords, Wordclay

Rob Walker

Facebook, Twitter, LinkIn, Plaxo, Myspace, Crimespace, DL., Five Star, HarperCollins

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#1. We are driven; it is an addiction hardly controllable. Some call it a gift, others call it a curse.

#2 . We are creators. We get to play God. We craft the good, the bad, and the ugly characters; furthermore, we get to decide on their FATEs, their LIVEs, and if they should live or die. It is a rush.

#3. We novelist, playwrights, script writers get to play all the parts, whereas actors typically are held to one part and one role only. So it is like what we did as kids – play. Writing is play and should be a playful “art” and “science”.


#4. We can tell people we are “Working” while we are “Playing” and no one is any the wiser.


#5. We get to create metaphors for what we do and metaphor creation for your “work” is in and of itself a fun activity as in “Writing is easy, like picking a scab until it bleeds, and when it stops bleeding, you pick at it for the next scene.” Or Writing is easy, all you have to do is open a vein….like lifting a raw egg of a linoleum floor….your turn to play.

#6. We write for our first reader – ourselves – which includes the guy who loves everything we spout, and the harsh critic within that detests everything we spout. We stiff arm both and somehow continue writing only by not settling for self-hype or mean-spirited criticism from that side of the brain that dislikes everything.

#7. Because we are “supposed” to….as in now I gotta get this blog outta my head an onto paper…or I have a deadline to meet with a story….or a self-imposed deadline.

#8. Because we love language and anything to do with language, and we love working in the “materials” of language and using the “tools” of language to craft “Kodak moments” and memorable scenes that move people to feel one emotion or another; in other words to wield the most powerful weapon on earth – Words. That which is mightier than the sword.

#9. Because we have a pack of lies (fiction/ficciones) inside us that have to get outside of us in order to “prove” a truth, quite often a truth surrounding the human condition. We are observers of the parade…the floating opera of life and we feel put here to make observations on same and pass them along to unsuspecting readers who think we are just entertainers.

#10. We write for money as well; we pray to be able to make a living at this “work” that we are passionate about, and if we can’t make a living at it, we spend a lifetime in another job to support the “habit”.

I write for craft and for money, and I have taught writing for over thirty years to support the addiction and the “need”. When I teach a creative writing class, I see two kinds of “writers come through the door – he who sees it as a glamorous thing to be recognized and called a writer or novelist or screenwriter (and most of these fail), and he or she who MUST write in order to breathe more easily, to get the stories and voices out of their heads and off their chests before the panic and pain of NOT writing these things out gets to them. In other words, a poet’s got to write poetry despite the fact there is no money in poetry and no poetry in money. And a woodworker has to work in wood, and a sculptor in stone….so a writer in words.

See if I live up to the ten reasons by picking up a copy of my latest work, DEAD ON. My wife, Miranda’s The WELL MEANING KILLER displays the same NEED to be written on every page.
Happy Writing and please feel free to leave a #11 or #12 etc. as a comment. Would love to hear from you.

Rob Walker
http://www.robertwalkerbooks.com/

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To pull off the so-called “impossible” – getting into the head of the opposite sex and understanding from this point of view, surprisingly enough, surrounds elemental, fundamental reliance on a “woman of substance” inside the VOICE.

VOICE in any dramatic, commercial fiction relies on strong Active Voice over weak passive textbook, WAS/WERE-riddled voices (leave the qualifying voice to the politicians). These basic grammatical decisions (word choice, exorcising qualifiers for absolutes, using active verbs over passives and cripplingly slow helping verbs, and exorcising the verb to be) are the crucibles of language about which E.B. White wrote in The Elements of Style and supported by the fine book Writing Shapely Fiction by Jerome Stern. Style comes out of extremely small elements you choose to make work for you—like a plug in the wall. Or items you fail to utilize.

As small as the choice difference between say the word before and ago, maybe and perhaps, this is “shaping” voice. This “becomes you”--BECOMEs your style. If you choose a folksy or shoddy or simplistic or complex or formal or informal voice, your reader will know it from the outset and is normally willing to follow it so long as this voice remains consistent and consistently believable.

So is VOICE the single most important element of your story? Absolutely, and yet it is created of all the other elements and choices you make, from setting to dialect to no dialect to the difference between between and betwixt, leaped and leapt, or using a comma for a dash. I personally make a habit of using contractions, dashes, and mixing sentence types from simple to compound to complex to compound-complex. All my choices…all lessons we continually need to relearn with each book.

All good writing relies on the reader ‘falling for’ your Feminine or Male authorial\narrative voice, the point of view speaker, the mind you set your reader down into comfortably or awkwardly. If it is an ill fit, little wonder. The holy all of it is this: an author is a trick cyclist on the unicycle juggling twenty four plates in the air, spinning each ‘choice and decision and element’ at the end of long sticks all at once! Each plate, each stick, each prop is an important element, but they all culminate in the overall greatest EFFECT or illusion we writers create. The effect that your story has on the reader’s ear and mind’s eye. (A story is only as good as the effect it has on a reader.)
If I had said the writer is LIKE a trick cyclist rather than stating it as a fact, it rings a different bell, sends a different and less powerful blow. The use of LIKE and AS is terribly overdone in some “voices” in female-lead crime fiction. As are adjectives. As are adverbs. As is the use of passives, especially the WAS/WERE verb—a major killer of action and visualization. These mistaken choices riddle even a great deal of published fiction, and especially in the first person narrative along with the personal pronoun references to the narrator: I, me, my, mine, myself, often using the personal pronoun three and four times in a given sentence.

What a reader hears and pictures comes about as result of our giving him a believable SOUND in his head—along with images. The author’s voice, or the narrative voice (not always the same) or the character’s voice creates that sound. A “qualifying” character’s voice can be filled with qualifiers, but you are damned if your narrator or main character’s voice is riddled with qualifying, iffy, wishy-washiness. An absolute gives the same sentence the mental Kodak moments that look, feel, taste, smell, and sound like IMAGES. Images are made of this; they are not made of lines like: He was standing as if in a trance, and was soon climbing through a reddish fog that seemed to be lifting amid the treeline that almost acted as a filter to the sunlit Georgia hills. But rather: In a trance, Mick stood and climbed through a coppery red fog filtering through the Georgia treeline.


Robert W. Walker
www.myspace.com/robertwwalkerbooks
http://www.robertwalkerbooks.com/
htp://acmeauthorslink.blogspot.com
"Dead On takes the reader's capacity for the imagination of horror to stomach turning depths, and then gives it more twists than a Georgia backroad that paves an Indian trail." - Nash Black

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As both a writing professor and an editor with my Knife Services, I see all manner of writing from the best and greatest writing to the worst and most unfortunate. When an autopsy for your story or book is necessary, it may require a scalpel. In fact a Stryker saw may be needed to cut it to the bone. When I speak to other writers and editors, what I hear again and again about a book’s rejection is that it failed in one or more of the Ten Deadly Sins of writing and here they are:

10. No sense of play/fun comes through on the page—that the author is not passionate over his/her story to the degree that it shines through. Solution—rewrite with a smile.

9. No sense of specific audience the author is writing to excite. Difficult to determine the genre and thus audience. Solution—rewrite with a cold eye as to what category your story falls into.

8. No sense of forward-moving plot/action in the story. Solution—work with the word compelling tattooed on your brain or taped over your computer along with a list of and how all five senses can be placed in a scene.

7. Pronoun references are weak; pronouns proliferating to exclusion of naming people, places, and things. There are many errors that involve pronouns. Solution—name names and repeat names of people, places, and things. Triangulate character’s five senses and sometimes his/her sixth sense into each scene.

6. Cluttered sentences; overblown sentences and paragraphs. A given character or characters are blowhards—going on in paragraph-length dialogue segments. Solution—break into lengthy dialogue segments with “action” lines or “interruptions” from other characters.

5. Action stops cold with description of a person, place, or thing. Does not involve action in the descriptive segments. Solution—strive to sift everything through the mind and five senses of your characters, especially your main characters.

4. Passive Voice takes over throughout the story; Active Voice is dead or nonexistent. Helping, linking, and verb to be proliferation. Twelve WASes in a single paragraph. Solution—wrestle the verb to be and helping verbs to the mat and replace them with active verbs; takes work but can be done.

3. Sentences are filled with qualifiers—words that qualify otherwise strong nouns and verbs. Sentences riddled with qualifying remarks that undercut otherwise strong sentences. Solution—when in doubt, strike it out; when a word like Very or Maybe or Sometimes does not had power or allow the power to fall on the subject noun or verb, then excise this qualifier.

2. Dialogue is wooden; dialogue is perfect English but imperfect pitch. Too formal dialogue reads like bad lines for the Native American character in a western.

1. Failure to wring drama and conflict out of situations and characters. Solution—No guts, no glory; no conflict, no story. A story is a war (or should be), and a story without a war is a snippet. Each chapter should set up obstacles to one’s character. Character plus conflict equals drama.


In addition -- do not stop your ACTION to describe a person, place or thing. Place the thing, the setting, the other character into the perceptions of your main character. It is of little interest that “authorities” suspect the victim is already dead, but it is of huge interest to the reader that “Marcus” or “Katrina” suspects this.

I hope these comments are of use and helpful to you in rewriting and finishing your novel or story. To locate direct help from me and my Knife Services at [email protected]

Rob Walker
www.robertwalkerbooks.com

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