Category Archives: Fiction

Read, Read, Read

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”

~Stephen King

I met a young man in a critique group who had an excellent premise for his novel. I asked him if he read anything in that genre. His unflinching reply, “Oh, I don’t read books.”

Unbelievable!

Good writers read and write a lot. Inspiration can come from various sources, not just their own genre. As a memoir and fiction writer, I’ve read a number of books that have helped me improve my creative skills. Some books I’ve kept in my do-not-lend collection.

The Cry and the Covenant, the historical fiction by Morton Thompson, chronicles a doctor’s efforts in preventing women from dying of childbed fever. As a teaching physician at a hospital, he insisted that his students and colleagues wash their hands after working on a cadaver and before helping a woman deliver her baby. This was before widespread acceptance of germ theory and his colleagues resisted his efforts. Women continued to die. Thompson’s description of the ignorance of the medical staff and the doctor’s frustration was powerful.

I reread Lynn S. Hightower’s Flashpoint to study her writing style and because I enjoyed the fact that a female serial killer was quite intriguing and believable. Hightower is excellent in this genre.

Charles Pellegrino’s Dust is a terrifying tale of a worldwide biological chain of events that threatens the survival of mankind. Since reading that book, I haven’t met a dust bunny I didn’t try to kill.

Phantom by Susan Kay is a powerful prequel to The Phantom of the Opera. Each chapter is told from the point of view of the person with whom the phantom comes in contact, beginning with his mother who recoiled at the sight of her disfigured newborn. This book demonstrates strong character development.

The World’s Love Poetry, edited by Michael Rheta Martin, contains more than 500 poems – lyrical, bawdy, tragic, beautiful, and moving – from centuries ago to modern times.

The Stovepipe by Bonnie E. Virag is an emotionally moving memoir of a young girl’s struggle and survival after she and her many siblings were taken from their home and put in foster care. The book ends with “After Thoughts,” a touching recap of her family members’ whereabouts.

I’ve enjoyed rereading the adventures and viewing the awesome pictures of the travels of Kwang and Kook-Wha Koh in their book, Hopping Seven Continents, Maybe one day I can go to some of the places they’ve been.

The young man I mentioned did self-publish his book, but the story wasn’t fully developed or well-written. No surprise there. He should have read more books.

What are you reading?

What’s Magic in a Million Words?

In addition to being a ‘word’ person, I’m also a ‘numbers’ person.  So when I hear someone say, “You have to write a million words before you will have something good enough to publish,” both sides of my brain start to fire up.  Can you imagine?  A magic number to work toward, and when you reach it all your writing dreams will come true.  Sounds wonderful, but I know it doesn’t work like that.

Nonetheless, a lot of people seem to be striving to meet that magical number.  Do a search on the internet for the phrase ‘write a million words’ and you’ll see what I mean.  So what’s the allure?  I think the draw is due to several messages the phrase communicates:

1)       Practice Makes Perfect – This centuries old bit of common sense is motivation to keep at it and work to improve at what you do.  I would modify it to say, “Practice, with feedback, makes perfect.”  You can do a lot of your own editing to improve the quality of your work.  However, getting feedback is important in order to avoid the blind spots you get from being too close to your own writing.  Don’t take the ‘million word’ phrase too literally and wait till you hit the one million mark to show your work to anyone.  The better way is to get feedback as you go and be open to constructive advice.

2)       Persevere – Rejection comes with the job so don’t take being turned down by publishers and agents personally.  If you self-publish and don’t gain an audience, don’t take that personally either.  There are many reasons why your work might not be accepted.  You may never find out the reasons, and if you do it may not make any sense or have anything to do with your talent.  So when a rejection letter comes in, resolve to keep going and continue on your writing path.

3)       It’s Helpful to Have a Goal – No matter how much you love writing, there may be times when you can use some extra incentive to keep you moving along.  Getting to the million word mark can be a fun way of challenging yourself, or creating a friendly rivalry between writers.  Organized events such as the National Novel Writing Month offer support and resources to help and encourage you toward your goal.

Ultimately, writing is a journey with no fixed end and no roadmaps to sure things or dead ends.  If things don’t happen for you in the first one million words, maybe it will happen in the second.  Author Ursula K. Le Guin said “It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end.”  Enjoy your journey, wherever it may take you.  That’s where the magic lies and the only person who can stop it is you.  Don’t let it end too soon.

Six Sensible Rules for Suspense

Amy stirs, half asleep and freezing cold with a putrid taste sticking to her throat. In the distance, her two dogs bark frantically. Much closer, the wind whistles in the fog and gently brushes her cheek, and that puzzles her…?

Amy wakes with a jolt and shivers with fear. “Glenn!” she calls, coughs and shoves the lump that is her husband. “Glenn! There’s a fire! Glenn, wake up!”

Glenn feels flaccid and clammy, and just snores through the thick smoke now rushing over them. She looks towards the dresser and the digital clock but sees only dark. “Glenn!” She turns him over, her voice hysterical, harsh. She swallows clawing smoke and stale booze. Glenn snores. Amy tries to get out of bed but the smoke and the heat beat her back.

“Brian! Bria! Jump!!” What was a putrid, cold fog only seconds ago is now an oven pouring out suffocation. “Jump!!”

She pulls the comforter over her head and thinks of her children as she clasps her throat. The smoke presses down and crushes all hope. She hears the roar of a locomotive drown out the dogs, and she whimpers with her last breath, “Please, jump!”

What did you see in this scene?

Did you see a cold, dark, two-story house on fire? Did you see Amy’s dogs downstairs barking to get someone’s attention? Her kids asleep, already dead, or hopefully jumping for their lives? Did you see fire roaring up the stairwell? A desperate woman trying to wake a drunk? Did you see Amy surrender to the sheer weight of her circumstances? In less than a minute, did you see what mattered most in her all-too-brief life?

If so, you’ve got a pretty good mind’s eye because the entire 60-seconds was clouded in smoke.

Amy couldn’t see a thing! She coughed the smoke, heard the dogs, the wind and the fire, felt and smelled the inebriated Glenn and the putrid of something toxic. Jump shouted that it was a two-story house, wind and roar brought smoke and fire rushing up the stairs. Stale booze gave you a taste of why Glenn was not waking up. Not one word was written for the eyes. If the only sense Amy had were her vision, she would have died in her sleep like Glenn. End of story. And that is exactly what writing to the other senses does – it wakes up your reader, it lets them see through the smoke.

The senses are five vital, but very different, utensils in the writing’s toolbox. Here are my six sensible rules for how to use them correctly.

General Rule: “Taste and touch follow what we see. Smells and sounds precede our sight.”
Where you can show better tension, wordplay becomes fuel for your fire and you’ll want to break the rules. That’s the fun bit, but that’s not the first rule.

First Rule. “Don’t stop to smell the roses in first draft, just get your hero to safe harbor.” In other words, don’t let the minutia bog you down; finish the scene. Finish your novel.

It is only natural for the suspense author to write through his/her eyes because we envision our story as we write it – We make this stuff up! In first draft, it is much easier to just paint the broad strokes while our fireworks are still in the air. Fair enough. But use your second draft to color in all the tiny, mind-searing, sparkling bursts with precision. Not just: “Stole a Jet Ski and zigzagged out into the storm dodging bullets.” (1st draft). Let your readers: “Inhale the salty air, feel the rumble of the engine through her thighs and hold on tight as the Jet Ski slams-hard-against-the-surf, while Sluggo’s bullets wiz past her ear.” (2nd draft). Save those salty, rumbling details for when you’re more relaxed and can take the time to study the scene carefully, with all five of your senses functioning freely.

Second Rule: “Cleverly, but clearly, break the rest of the rules where it adds suspense.” Do this where it adds more tension, comedy or calamity.

“Just slept on it funny,” he gruffed and limped away.

That works, in a lame way, because people don’t usually sound gruff when they are trying to be funny (or use the word lame when trying to be serious), and your actions or characters will become indelible.

Third Rule: “Hearing delivers more than just sound.”

Sound is the hardest of all the senses to fool on the page, so it should be the easiest “other” sense to write to. Be careful: sound is also the only sense that we rely on with impunity. The other four work in harmony, they confirm or cancel each other out, but sound is a lone actor in the dark. Because we have two ears, we also get a sense of direction and distance which adds to the tension. When a sound beckons your character, and before they turn their eyes in that direction, their mind has already played back memories of what that sound – or voice – meant. Just reusing that sound and response in a later chapter can recall all the trauma in the first scene. You can now draw comparisons to that first scene without saying another word, without compromising pace or tension.

“A shot rang out! He heard the cock of an antique Winchester and knew who was behind it.” (2nd scene – I’ll let you color in the first scene.)

Your character will trust their ears before their eyes. They’ll likely first crouch, scream or run, or smile, laugh or pucker up based on what they hear, then see if they’re right. Or horribly wrong!

Horrific sights should freeze your mortal characters to a point where they cannot move. Frightening sounds should have them running first, thinking later.

Fourth Rule: “Touch and taste are secondary to sight.”

These two senses always confirm what we see. Well, almost always. Walk, barefoot through a dark cave and stepped on something cold and slimy that went hissss, and clearly you see a snake. But that only works in a dark cave, and because our ears confirmed our worst fears.

Touch and taste we can take as one because we rarely use them together – popcorn being one exception; sex being another. But touch and taste only work in only a limited way on the page because these two senses are internal by nature. If what you write is out of sync with dear reader’s preconceived notion, your tasty words will not be enrichment at all. One woman’s yum is another’s woman’s yuck.

No vegetarian is going to agree with your “mouth-watering” response to the question, how was the beef Wellington? (1st draft) But what if your character’s response were instead, “She rolled her eyes, held her tummy and tongued her lips.” (2nd) Carnivorous readers might still salivate, but your vegetarian audience might see gag me and make me throw up from the same three motions. And you haven’t carelessly taken a segment of your audience out of the story. That’s what I mean by be careful with taste and touch.

Generic feelings (kiss, hold, hug), and tastes (salty, cold, hot) work best with strong adverbs like humongous and dainty. Unique feelings (itching, stinging, horrifying) and tastes (briny, zesty, spicy) work best on their own.

Fifth Rule: “When in doubt, follow your nose.”

Scent is a different breed of cat all together. In my piece at the beginning, it is the smell of smoke that awakens Amy, and she has full command of all of her senses within a heartbeat. We cannot ignore the scent of fear. If something foreign gets past our nose, our subconscious instantly knows that it can’t let anything happen to our breathing. Scent is the only one of the five sense that will wake us up from a deep sleep with our adrenalin already pumping.

Scents stick with us, too. Some, forever…. Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and take in memories like: That wonderful aroma of Grandma’s kitchen; your wedding corsage; your dog after it caught the skunk. If the last one of these got you to blink or your nostrils to twitch, I rest my case. “Wonderful aroma” and “skunk” don’t fit. But, you knew that.

So the only trick here is to use scents correctly, by appeal. Fragrances heighten a sensual scene, or turn the screws on uncertain moments. Aromas can instantly cast light on the dark, or call forth a forgotten memory. Odors tell time’s passage, they foretell danger down the road and quickly time-stamp past, traumatic events.

Sixth Rule: “Men focus on the hunt; women gather on the periphery.”

Which brings us to the eyes. Writing descriptive suspense for the eyes is as easy as carrying on a conversation with a close confidant. Just vividly put on the page what your mind’s eye beholds and don’t hold back. If you’re writing in third-person, imagine your friend is telling you instead.

Only, it is important to remember that your men and women will see things differently. And that difference is primordial. And that primordial instinct is the very essence of believable suspense.

In pre-historic times, the male hunters depended on silence to sneak up on their prey. They used their two eyes together to fix on the distance needed to throw their spear and kill dinner. Another hunter knew exactly what this man was thinking by just following his gaze. Gatherers – the women, children and one-eyed old men – depended on making noise and using their voices to scare the wild things from the berry bushes. For protection, women used their two eyes to focus on two or more things at the same time. They learned to depend on their peripheral vision to spot movements off to the side. One wrong move and they’d be stung or bitten, or become the dinner.

Those two unique survival traits are still in our eyes today. Men still look straight into who or what has their mental focus, and women are still much quicker at spotting movement on the periphery while looking you in the eye.

That’s true about not only the lady’s deep, baby-blue, mischievous, sparkling, haunting, adorned, oval, cat-like, vicious, emerald, crying, smiling, laughing, sad, happy or otherwise adorable eyes that we can clearly see, but her mind’s eye, too. Her sixth sense is broad. His is keen.

Six Sensible Rules for Suspense
1) Don’t stop to smell the roses in first draft, just get your hero to safe harbor.
2) Cleverly, but clearly, break the rules where it make more suspense.
3) Hearing delivers more than just sound: direction; distance; friend-or-foe.
4) Touch and taste are secondary to sight.
5) When in doubt, follow your nose.
6) Men focus on the hunt; women gather on the periphery.

Next Month: Information dumps. Those lumps of facts and timestamps that precede your storyline are so often the hidden, root cause for your character’s actions. Until you get them on the page your story remains convoluted where you want to be clear. But factoids are just the canvas, not the painting. You can’t allow them to slow down the action and quick pace that is suspense! They’re essential, and, at the right moment, need to be clearly conveyed, but it doesn’t have to read like a rap sheet. Next month we’ll look at how to backfill your story without slowing down the action.

Does your car need a poetic license plate?

Bet’cha you’re a poet and didn’t even know it.

However, ask me if I’m a poet, and my immediate response is no.  After all, poetry is sing-songy rhymes sung by first graders.  Classic poets are older writers spewing stylized language for pages upon pages.  The new wave of poets are hipsters baring their raw, tortured souls for 20 minutes on coffeeshop stages, waxing on the dearth of the human landscape. I’m just a wanna-be hipster, but I do appreciate Spoken Word.  I just don’t “get” a lot of it.

Poetry intimidates me.  I feel pressured to find something meaningful from the long strangling paragraphs of confusing and deep intense emotions.  When I don’t get some passionate, life-changing insight, I feel like a numb, witless slug.  Shakespeare frustrates me because my reading flow is disrupted by looking up too many word definitions.  Again, I’m the imbecile.  Too often, poetry is dissected in a class assignment to study form and intention, not enjoyed for the words themselves.  Poetry becomes work, stale and tedious.  There are ways to make poetry approachable, and that is to have fun.

One of my Top Five Favorite College Projects actually came in a poetry class I took as a junior.  Our assignment had a list of specific rules, including writing in a particular meter with rhythm and using a specific number of words from the glossary provided.  The challenge was the intrigue, and my submission, “To Catch a Frog,” is the only poem I ever committed to memory.  This is the first stanza of the one page poem:

To kiss a frog, some say, may lead

to warts upon one’s foolish head.

So it occurred that fateful eve,

when I was lured to test belief,

departed with my sturdy trap

to catch a frog down Boggy Swamp.

 Poetry can be a space to play and experiment, even for the non-poet writer.  It is fractured storytelling.  You can choose not to follow the traditional rules of grammar or punctuation.  April is National Poetry Month, the NaNoWriMo for poets.  This is the time to celebrate something new or forgotten.

About 14 years ago, I discovered the appeal of haiku. My friend and I traveled to a book expo in New York City.  She is a poet, so it was no surprise that the haiku year caught her eye.  The book features haikus written on postcards and mailed amongst a group of friends.  The poetry form itself presents a limited commitment composing three lines of 5-7-5 syllables.  It is short and structured with some boundaries, thus user-friendly.  Perfect.

We both loved the creativity of it, so we emailed daily haikus to give out Inbox joy and mailed weekend postcards to keep our mailboxes from becoming jealous.  We still do this today, with our subject material less nature-focused and more snippets of life in the style of senryu.photo

I discovered an iPhone app, Heyku, which encourages anyone to post any type of poetry, with the option to add interactive sketches, photos, or sound to each poem. I do not know the size of this online community, but I find it welcoming because I have followers of my poetry.  I feel safe here, and thus more confident in my approach.  You can find me there at d.w.Hirsch, always under the #haiku tag.  Many of my haikus are now posted on Instagram (dwhirsch) where I can become more hipster with the trendy, special filters.  Whatever the format, whether the month is April or beyond, my writing is whimsical and casual, the way I think poetry should be.

Be your own poet.

Potty Mouth

Last November, one of my favorite cozy mystery authors, Ali Brandon, who writes the Black Cat Bookshop Mysteries series, blogged about her characters’ reluctance to use bathrooms. (Check out her blog here.) If you think about it, you don’t read about characters using the facilities. You don’t see this often on TV either. I mean how many times did Jack Bauer go during the 24 hours he spent saving the world?

Ever wonder why that is? After all, it’s perfectly normal to have to use the restroom. Considering how much coffee, baked goods, dinner, and alcohol are consumed by cozy characters, Ali Brandon points out that there’s no reason why an author can’t include a bathroom trip or two in her story as long as it doesn’t slow down the action.

During our last Deadwood Writers holiday dinner, a very nice lady asked me about my day job. I was happy to answer that I’m a janitor for a professional cleaning company and I currently clean at an institute of higher education. Then she asked me if I had learned anything from my job that I could apply to my writing. Hmm . . . how to answer that question, considering we were at dinner, and the biggest lesson I had learned was how gross people can be. My coworkers and I were constantly picking up half-empty beverage bottles, paper towels, discarded pens, and those little pieces that students tear off the edges of paper that’s been ripped out of spiral bound notebooks.

But the most disgusting thing I learned while doing my job is that a lot of people have absolutely no concept of restroom manners–I mean the basic things we were all taught during potty training. Things like flushing the toilet or urinal, washing your hands, and throwing your trash in the trashcan have literally gone by the wayside.

These activities are social mores we learned at a young age. They are not optional. Have you ever heard a mother tell her child, “You can skip washing your hands. Nothing bad will happen”? No. How about, “Don’t bother flushing the toilet. The next person will get it”? No.

That’s why I don’t understand how people can leave a bathroom stall in such dire straits. If they tried leaving such messes at home, their mothers would knock them into next Tuesday. Wives would turn husbands out of their bedrooms for some of the infractions I’ve seen. Bathrooms across the metro area would ring out with admonitions like: “Were you born in a barn?”; “Didn’t I teach you better than that?”; “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a hundred thousand times. . . .”

So writers, what does this mean for you and me? Pundits advise us to make our characters believable. I’m here to tell you that a believable character not only uses the restroom, but he or she leaves evidence of the visit behind. Either the facilities are just as clean, or cleaner, as they were when the user entered; or sometimes, the floor, seat and/or bowl is covered with biohazardous material. And believe me, you can’t get more graphic or gross than what I’ve seen in real life.

Take the potty break as an opportunity to reveal your character’s true self. After using the restroom and washing up, your character grabs a soap-covered paper towel and cleans the seat, handle, stall door lock, and the faucets. Why? Is he obsessive-compulsive? Is he getting rid of fingerprints–or DNA? Does your character have a disease that’s spread through contact with biological material which he hopes to contain? Is he a twisted bioterrorist spreading infected blood or urine throughout the bathroom instead of cleaning it?

Don’t forget the humorous aspect of bathroom use. A fish-out-of-water character, who is unfamiliar with motion-controlled facilities at an upscale restaurant or hotel, might do battle with the auto-flush toilet, or the self-dispensing hand soap. And if you write for middle grade readers, you can get away with a lot in the name of potty humor. Just ask Matt Stone and Trey Parker, creators of South Park.

So don’t fear leading your character into the bathroom, just be sure to put the seat down when you’re done.