The Timeless Advice of Dylan Thomas

We have all run across people who ask us the damnedest questions, sometimes so stupid they beggar belief:

"How do I write a bestseller?" Look, if I knew, I'd be doing a tour of morning news shows.

"Do you have Stephen King's address and phone number?" No, and I doubt if he has mine, either.

"Could I make more money writing spy thrillers or horror stories?" Flip a coin, flip a coin.

"I have a great idea - do you know a good agent?" No. The only people who get to pitch ideas are Stephen King, J. K. Rowling, James Patterson, et al, and all they have to do is whisper, and the contract shows up.

"I have a great idea - you could write it, and we'd split the profits 50/50." Better yet, you write it and I won't read it.

Sigh…

But sometimes someone writes the most brilliant response to all these questions. Back in 1951 or thereabouts, the editor of "Circus" asked Dylan Thomas "to describe the steps which help to establish a popular poet in England today. It was an opportunity for irony which he has not wasted."

Enjoy.

How to Be a Poet or the Ascent of Parnassus Made Easy

by Dylan Thomas

Let me, at once, make it clear that I am not considering, in these supposedly informative jotrhythmic, Poetry as an Art or a Craft, as the rhythmic verbal expression of a spiritual necessity or urge, but solely as the means to a social end; that end being the achievement of a status in society solid enough to warrant the poet discarding and expunging those affectations, so essential in the early stages, of speech, dress, and behavior; an income large enough to satisfy his physical demands, unless he has already fallen victim to the Poet’s Evil, or Great Wen; and a permanent security from the fear of having to write any more. I do not intend to ask, let alone to answer, the question, “Is Poetry a Good Thing?” but only, “Can Poetry Be Made Good Business?"

I shall, to begin with, introduce to you a few of the main types of poets who have made the social and financial grade.

First, though not in order of importance, is the poet who has emerged docketed “lyrical,” from the Civil Service. He can be divided, so far as his physical appearance goes, into two types.

He is either thin, not to say of a shagged-out appearance, with lips as fulsome, sensual, and inviting as a hen’s ovipositor, bald from all too maculate birth, his eyes made small and reddened by reading books in French, a language he cannot understand, in an attic in the provinces while young and repellent, his voice like the noise of a mouse’s nail on tinfoil, his nostrils transparent, his breath gray; or else he is jowlcd and bushy, with curved pipe and his nose full of dottle, the look of all Sussex in his stingo’d eyes, his burry tweeds smelling of the dogs he loathes, with a voice like a literate Airedale’s that has learned its vowels by correspondence course, and an intimate friend of Chesterton’s, whom he never met.

Let us see in what manner our man has arrived at his present and enviable position as the Poet who has made Poetry Pay:

Dropped into the Civil Service at an age when many of our young poets now are running away to Broadcasting House, today’s equivalent of the Sea, he is at first lost to sight in the mountains of red tape which, in future years, he is so mordantly, though with a wry and puckered smile, to dismiss in a paragraph in his “Around and About My Shelves.” After a few years, he begins to peer out from the forms and files in which he leads his ordered, nibbling life, and picks up a cheese crumb here, a dropping there, in his ink-stained thumbs. His ears are uncannily sensitive: he can hear an opening being opened a block of offices away.

And soon he learns that a poem in a Civil Service magazine is, if not a step up the ladder, at least a lick in the right direction. And he writes a poem. It is, of course, about Nature; it confesses a wish to escape from humdrum routine and embrace the unsophisticated life of the farm laborer; he desires, though without scandal, to wake up with the birds; he expresses the opinion that a plowshare, not a pen, best fits his little strength; a decorous pantheist, he is one with the rill, the rhyming mill, the rosy-bottomed milkmaid, the russet-cheeked rat-catcher, swains, swine, pipits, pippins. You can smell the country in his poems, the fields, the flowers, the armpits of Triptolemus, the barns, the byres, the hay, and, most of all, the corn. The poem is published. A single lyrical extract from the beginning must suffice: —

The roaring street is hushed!

Hushed, do I say?

The wing of a bird has brushed

Time’s cobwebs away.

Still, still as death, the air

Over the gray stones!

And over the gray thoroughfare

I hear — sweet tones! —

A blackbird open its bill,

— A blackbird, aye! —

And sing its liquid fill

From the London sky.

A little time after the publication of the poem, he is nodded to in the corridor by Hotchkiss of Inland Revenue... Hotchkiss, lunching with Sowerby of Customs, himself a literary figure of importance with a weekly column in Will o’ Lincoln’s Weekly and his name on the editorial list of the Masterpiece of the Fortnight Club (volumes at reduced rates to all writers, and a complete set of the works of Mary Webb quarter-price at Christmas), says casually, “You’ve rather a promising fellow in your department, Sowerby. Young Cribbe. I’ve been reading a little thing of his, ‘I desire the Curlew.’” And Cribbe’s name goes the small fetid rounds.

He is next asked to contribute a group of poems to Hotchkiss’s anthology, “New Pipes,” which Sowerby praises — “a rare gift for the haunting phrase” — in Will o’ Lincoln’s. Cribbe sends copies of the anthology, each laboriously signed, “To the greatest living English poet, in homage,” to twenty of the dullest poets still on their hind legs. Some of his inscribed gifts are acknowledged. Sir Tom Knight spares a few generous, though bemused, moments to scribble a message on a sheet of crested writing paper removed, during a never-to-be-repeated week-end visit, from a shortsighted but not all that shortsighted peer. “Dear Mr. Crabbe,” Sir Tom writes, '’I appreciate your little tribute. Your poem, ‘Nocturne with Lilies,’ is worthy of Shanks. Go on. Go on. There is room on the mount.” The fact that Cribbe’s poem is not “Nocturne with Lilies” at all, but “On Hearing Delius by a Lych-Gate,” does not perturb Cribbe, who carefully files the letter, after blowing away the dandruff, and soon is in the throes of collecting his poems to make a book, “Linnet and Spindle,” dedicated “To Clem Sowerby, that green-fingered gardener in the Gardens of the Hesperides.”

The book appears. Some favorable notice is taken, particularly in Middlesex. And Sowerby, too modest to review it himself after such a gratifying dedication, reviews it under a different name. “This young poet,” he writes, “is not, thanks be it, too ‘modernistic’ to pay reverence to the shining source of his inspiration. Cribbe will go far.”

And Cribbe goes to his publishers. A contract is drawn up, Messrs. Stitch and Time undertaking to publish his next book of verse on condition that they have the first option on his next nine novels. He contrives also to be engaged as a casual reader of manuscripts to Messrs. Stitch and Time, and returns home clutching a parcel which contains a book on the Development of the Oxford Movement in Finland by a Cotswold Major, three blank-verse tragedies about Mary Queen of Scots, and a novel entitled “Tomorrow, Jennifer.”

Now Cribbe, until his contract, has never thought of writing a novel. But, undaunted by the fact that he cannot tell one person from another—people, to him, are all one dull, gray mass, except celebrities and departmental superiors — that he has no interest whatsoever in anything they do or say, except in so far as it concerns his career, and that his inventive resources are as limited as those of a chipmunk on a treadmill, he sits down in his shirt sleeves, loosens his collar, thumbs in the shag, and begins to study in earnest how best, with no qualifications, to make a success of commercial fiction.

He soon comes to the conclusion that only quick sales and ephemeral reputations are made by tough novels with such titles as “I’ve Got It Coming” or “Ten Cents a Dice,” by proletarian novels about the conversion to dialectical materialism of Palais-de wide boys, entitled, maybe, “ Red Rain on You, A If,” by novels called, maybe, “Melody in Clover,” about dark men with slight limps. And he soon sees that only the smallest sales, and notices only in the loftiest monthlies of the most limited circulation, will ever result from his writing such a novel as “The Inner Zodiac,” by G. H. Q. Bidet, a ruthless analysis of the ideological conflicts arising from the relationship between Philip Armour, an international impotent physicist, Tristram Wolf, a bisexual sculptor in teak, and Philip’s virginal but dynamic Creole wife, Titania, a lecturer in Balkan Economics, and how these highly sensitized characters react a profound synthesis while working together, for the sake of One-ness, in a Unesco Clinic.

No fool, Cribbe realizes, even in the early stages of his exploration, with theodolite and respirator through darkest Foyle, that the novel to write is that which commands a steady, unsensational, provincial and suburban sale and concerns, for choice, the birth, education, financial ups-and-downs, marriages, separations, and deaths of five generations of a family of Lancashire cotton brokers. This novel, he grasps at once, should be in the form of a trilogy, and each volume should bear some such solid, uneventful title as “The Warp,” “The Woof,” and “The Way.” And he sets to work.

From the reviews of Cribbe’s first novel, one may select: “Here is sound craftsmanship allied to sterling characterization.” “English as Manchester rain.” “Mr. Cribbe is a bull-terrier.” “A story in the Phyllis Bottome class.” On the success of the novel, Cribbe joins the N.I.B. Club, delivers a paper on the Early Brett Young Country, and becomes a regular reviewer, praising every other novel he receives— (“The prose shimmers”) and inviting every third novelist to dine at the Servile Club, to which he has recently been elected.

When the whole of the trilogy has appeared, Cribbe rises, like scum, to the N.I.B. committee, attends all the memorial services for men of letters who are really dead for the first time in fifty years, tears up his old contract and signs another, brings out a new novel, which becomes a Book Society choice, is offered, by Messrs. Stitch and Time, a position in an “advisory capacity,” which he accepts, leaves the Civil Service, buys a cottage in Bucks (“You wouldn’t think it was only thirty miles from London, would you. Look, old man, see that crested grebe.” A starling flies by), a new desk and a secretary whom he later marries for her touch-typing. Poetry? Perhaps a sonnet in the Sunday Times every now and then: a little collection of verse once in a while (“ My first love, you know”). But it doesn’t really bother him any more, though it got him where he is. He has made the grade!

---

But let us look, very quickly, at some other methods of making poetry a going concern.

The Provincial Rush, or the Up-Rimbaud-and-At-Em approach. This is not wholeheartedly to be recommended as certain qualifications are essential. Before you swoop and burst upon the center of literary activity — which means, when you are very young, the right pubs, and, later, the right flats, and, later still, the right clubs — you must have behind you a body (it need have no head) of ferocious and un-understandable verse. (It is not, as I said before, my function to describe how these gauche and verbose ecstasies are achieved. Hart Crane found that, while listening, drunk, to Sibelius, he could turn out the stuff like billyho. A friend of mine, who has been suffering from a violent headache since he was eight, finds it so easy to write anyway he has to tie knots in his unpleasant handkerchief to remind him to stop. There are many methods, and always, when there’s a will and slight delirium, there’s a way.) Again, this poet, must possess a thirst and constitution like that of a salt-eating pony, a hippo’s hide, boundless energy, prodigious conceit, no scruples, and — most important of all, this can never be overestimated — a home to go hack to in the provinces whenever he breaks down.

The White Horse Tavern in New York City
where Thomas was drinking before his death

Of the poet who merely writes because he wants to write, who does not deeply mind if he is published or not, and who can put up with poverty and total lack of recognition in his lifetime, nothing of any pertinent value can be said. He is no businessman. Posterity Does Not Pay.  

Also, and highly unrecommended, are the following: —

The writing of limericks. Vast market, little or no pay.

Poems in crackers. Too seasonal.

Poems for children. This will kill you, and the children.

Obituaries in verse. Only established favorites used. Poetry as a method of blackmail (by boring). Dangerous. The one you blackmail might retaliate by reading you aloud his unfinished tragedy about St. Bernard: “The Flask.”

And lastly: Poems on lavatory walls. The reward is purely psychological."

Dylan Thomas' writing shed.
photo by Richard Knight

To read the whole article, go HERE.

Good Sentences

If the sentence is "the fundamental unit of a work of literature," then a good sentence should be the goal of a good writer. But what is a good sentence?

Found another excellent lesson for writers online, entitled HOW TO WRITE A GREAT SENTENCE. What I like most about the article is what we know – there is no definite way to write a great sentence.

Beginning with an explanation of "style" by the use of "creative devices, grammar, diction, tone, rhythm and cadence," the article says all of those elements "taken as a whole" is "style."

For examples to compare styles, the article chose William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway.

Faulkner wrote purple prose with long, convoluted sentences. Whereas Hemingway wrote short, clipped, concise, pithy sentences capturing, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, "the flicker of modern life.”

The tempo of the writer's sentences reflect the speed of the lives they depicted. "Faulkner basks in the heat of south" while "Hemingway flits at life in the city." While Faulkner lounged, Hemingway rushed.

Faulkner said of Hemingway, "He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."

Hemingway said of Faulkner, "Poor Faulkner, does he really think big emotions come from big words?"

Faulkner House, 624 Pirate Alley, New Orleans
where Nobel laureate William Faulkner
wrote his first novel Soldiers’ Pay, 1925

The article illustrates examples of each writer's work, chosen as they serve "the acute ends of he spectrum of sentence structure."

Long sentences? Short sentence. Medium length sentences. Vary them to turn your writing into music, let your writing sing, give it a pleasant lilt, a harmony.

OK, I knew a lot of this but the article is a good reminder. I recommend it, expecially to beginning writers.

 

 

 

 

© The Written Word

 

That's all for now,

www.ONeilDeNoux.com

Writers of the World: Bifurcate Now!

I am not a lawyer, accountant, or literary agent, but I do think that seven years working in the trenches of a children’s math magazine at Scholastic taught me a skill that is apparently lost on the accounts payable clerks who toil for two different literary agents that I will not identify: I know how to multiply a gross figure by a decimal and calculate exactly how much to send me, the freaking author.

Maybe you don’t have such problems. You are blessed with an earnest, hardworking, bookish agent who throws her heart and soul into repping you. Her only fault is that she’s a one-woman agency, somewhat scattered, and your royalty checks and statements routinely reach you about 90 days after the publisher sent them to her. Earning interest in Cat Lady’s account, in other words, and not yours.

Or maybe your agent is a crook or employs a felonious bookkeeper.

The remedy for all this is a beautiful word with Latin roots: bifurcation. That means the publisher pays each of you your share of the royalties directly, without mingling your cashola with the agent’s.

Two minutes of research reveals that in the Devonian epoch, publishers directly paid writers, who were then responsible for paying their agents. That arrangement was altered in the Pleistocene, when it was decreed that writers could not be trusted with Other People’s Money and that agents were infinitely more trustworthy.

Moreover, when checks, royalty statements, annual tax statements, and currency itself had to be hand-chiseled on stone tablets, it was so much easier for the publisher to send a giant wad of money to, say, sixteen agents, and let them dole out minuscule amounts to the respective writers. Relieved that of that onerous paperwork (and the associated labor costs), publishers could get on with the rarefied work of curation.

But OMG, guys! Have you heard? Funds can now be electronically electroned to the money store of your choice, so why not bifurcate? It’s the smart thing to do.

I have ghostwritten a number of books for business people, many of whom instructed their literary agent to enact bifurcation on Day 1. It’s what you do in the “real” world of business. To people who think seriously about money, publishing’s financial traditions appear quite dumb.

In one email that I probably should not have received, the literary agent chided her client—the fellow whose book I was writing—saying bifurcation was fine to do with domestic (ie, US) contracts, but would be somewhat more complicated with foreign rights. She was only half right. It can be tricky. If I were doing a foreign deal today, I’d try to bifurcate, but for the purposes of this article, I’m going to focus on bifurcating payments on domestic royalties.

I took the fork most traveled by...

Why would you want to bifurcate? First, because the money owed to writers goes missing all the time. The most egregious case is the one involving the literary agency that represented Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk, not to mention the estates of Edward Gorey, Mario Puzo, Peter Matthiessen, Joseph Heller, Studs Terkel, and many more. The firm’s bookkeeper embezzled $3.4 million over seven years. Apologizing profusely to their clients, the principals of the firm watched as their weeping former employee was sentenced to two years in prison, then filed for bankruptcy. By all accounts, a respectable firm ground into the dust by greed.

Second, I’d bifurcate because one writer’s personal stash of dead-wood agents can quickly pile up like cordwood. I’m a mid-lister at best, yet in my career, my money has flowed to the offices of a total of six literary agents. Back in the day, I befriended a scrappy young agent who landed me a few book deals. He departed for a new firm, still agreeing to rep me but leaving his former employer responsible for paying me royalties on my “old” projects. When another agent of mine left her longtime agency, she and her longtime employer decided to split my rights between them. (No one bothered to ask what I wanted to do.) The dead-wood agency would send me royalties on my US rights, and “my” agent would rep my foreign and all other subsidiary rights.

It was nuts. At one point, I was getting checks from four different agencies, but only firm one repped me for reals. The others were, as I say, dead wood.

Talk about scary: At one firm, the longtime principals had retired, entrusting the distribution of royalty checks to—who else?—their progeny and grandchildren. At another firm, when the two principals began suing each other, they at least had the decency to teach their clients the B-word.

It was a tedious process, bifurcating payments with every print and audiobook publisher with whom my wife and I had ever signed a deal with. We set up bifurcations with Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, Audible, and Brilliance Audio. We got good at it, and once we were done bifurcating with our LIVE agents, I moved on to prune the dead wood.

Here’s what you do:

Get out copies of all the contracts you have with a single publisher. To make this easy on yourself, just deal with the publishers in your nation of residence to start. In other words, money that is coming from a US publisher to you, a US writer. If you’re a Canadian writer, you have my permission to bifurcate from your US agent and your US publisher. That transaction should go smoothly. But I’m neither a lawyer or accountant (as noted above).

At the top of your most recent royalty statement you will find the contact info of your publisher’s royalties department. On your royalty statements, you will see that your publisher has reduced you to a number. Write down your official author number, and fire off an email to this effect:

I’d like to bifurcate the following contracts—noted here by date, name of book, etc. My agent of record, noted in Paragraph Whatever, is Eustace Simoleons, of the Rackhamup Simoleons Literary Agency. The split-share on each of the birfucations should be 85 percent to me, the author, and 15 percent to the aged yet highly esteemed Mr. Simoleons. Mr. S and his numbskull assistant are cc’d on this email.

Note: If you have contracts at the same publisher that involve another agent, you’ll have to go down that route too.

Since they are no longer having to chisel money out of stone, I have found that royalty department drones have free time on their hands, and will most likely respond quickly: “Wow, a human wants to talk to us! Thank you for writing, Scribulous J. Scrivener! We’d love to help you set up that bifurcation, but Mr. Simoleons must assent before we proceed.”

Numbskull assistant will prod Mr. Simoleons to respond. If he’s still quite sagacious, Mr. S. will instantly comprehend that you have handed him a reason to reduce the annual hours paid to said nitwit. (“Sh*t—if I can get all my authors to do this, I might be able to fire my idiot assistants and drop payroll,” he will think, albeit privately to himself.)

If, on the other hand, Mr. Simoleons is shady or neurotic, he will phone to convince you that it’s in your favor to let him (man)handle your money. Hold firm. Say it’s a business thing, and you’re happy to get your attorney involved if it would make him feel more comfortable. (Only say this if you are not bluffing.) When you surmount that hurdle, the royalty department will send you a contract addendum like this:

We refer to the agreement (the “Contract”) dated TK, between Scribulous J. Scrivener (the “Author”), and Edified Press, at 123 Highly Overpriced Office Towers, NYC, (“the Publisher”), concerning BOOK TITLE (the “Work”).

It is hereby agreed as follows:

1. Paragraph TK of the Agreement—(ie, the so-called Literary Agency clause) is hereby deleted in its entirety and replaced with the following:
2. “Fifteen percent (15%) sums due Author under this Agreement shall be paid to the Author’s agent: Eustace Simoleons, Agency name and address (the “Agent”), whose receipt of funds shall be a full and valid discharge of Publisher’s obligations.
3. “Eighty-five percent (85%) of all sums due the Author under this Agreement will be paid directly to the Author at: Scrivener’s address. Receipt of those funds shall be a full and valid discharge of Publisher’s obligations.”

Nothing in these two paragraphs will be deemed to have changed the amounts otherwise payable by the Publisher under this Agreement. In all other respects the Agreement remains in full force and effect in accordance with its terms.

ACCEPTED AND AGREED:

Signed by Publisher

Signed by Author

Yes, you can get a lawyer to look at this, but I would recommend having the publisher draw up the doc first, so you don't incur excessive legal expenses on consultations with your attorney and their subsequent drafting of the doc. The agent is not required to sign, because the original contract was always between you, the author, and the publisher, with only one graf inserted to redirect your money to the agent.

You will need to execute this document for every book you have at this publisher, and at every other publisher that brings your work to market. You’ll do it for all the the other businesses that have signed subsidiary deals with you.

Not gonna lie to you. It will take time. While you’re at it, instruct the publisher to set up direct deposit as well, and agree to receive your royalty statements via email or their online royalty portal. The documents you sign today probably will not impact your royalty statements or payments for a year. Because publishing.

Once the new agreements start kicking in, however, you’ll forever get your 85 percent and the agent will get their 15 percent. At the end of the year, the publisher (not the agent) will send you your tax docs. Yay you!

From this moment forward, I predict that you will never hear from your dead-wood agents again, just the ones continuing to rep you. Although, because these idiots really cannot do math with decimals, you may occasionally get a check in the mail remitting you 85 percent of an agent’s 15 percent payment. (Yes, this has happened to me with two agents’ offices, several freaking times in a row.)

Once, I got an anxious call from the scion of a once-great literary agency who said, “Um, we just got a call from someone in Bulgaria who wants to do a deal with your book? Can you handle it?” (Translation: “Please don’t make us have to work after all these years of cashing grandpa’s checks.”)

JFC, publishing is stupid, but you don’t have to be. Bifurcate.

---

See you in three weeks.

— Joe

josephdagnese.com

Writing Dialog

Happy Independence Day!

Summer is a great time for reruns, so today I present “Writing Dialog,” which has been published in several places and is both a short story and a lesson in writing dialog. Enjoy. — Michael

Writing Dialog

“Dialog is difficult to write,” I said.

“Why?” An attractive young writer, eager to learn the secrets of my success, sat across from me. This wasn’t the first time we’d met to discuss writing.

“Because it must be realistic without being real.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Well, um, I’m not sure I can explain it, but—let’s see—real people, like, they stop and start and, um, they st-stutter and talk in run-on sentences. Or incomplete sentences. And they don’t always think before they, um, open their mouths and stuff. You know?”

“That was bad.”

“Wasn’t it, though?” I said. “I hear people talking like that every day.”

She leaned forward. “So how do you make dialog realistic without being real?”

I considered for a moment before continuing. “Take out the fluff. Don’t start sentences with ‘well.’ Eliminate the ‘um’s and ‘er’s. Eliminate throwaway bits such as ‘by the way.’”

“That sounds easy enough, but that can’t be it. There must be more.”

I reached across the table and patted her hand. She didn’t pull away. “There’s much more, but perhaps we should order a drink before continuing. You game?”

After she said she was, I called the waiter over, ordered a pair of frozen margaritas, and watched him walk away. Then I continued. “That was a good example.”

She appeared bewildered. “Of what?”

“Of knowing when to write dialog and when not to.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“I could have written, ‘I called the waiter over. He introduced himself, “Hi, I’m Bob. I’ll be serving you today.” “Hi, Bob,” I said. “What will you have?” he asked. “Two frozen margaritas,” I told him. “Is that all?” “Yes, Bob, that’s all,” I said. Then I watched him walk away before I continued.’”

“That wouldn’t have advanced the plot at all, would it?”

I smiled. She was beginning to understand. I said, “Not at all.”

“Anything else?”

“Avoid long blocks of ‘dialog’ where a single character does all the talking. Once a character has said more than three consecutive sentences, you’re in danger of writing a monolog or a soliloquy. Even worse is when each of your characters speaks in long, uninterrupted blocks. That creates alternating monologues.”

“That was four sentences.”

“You could have interrupted me and broken it up a bit.”

“No,” she said. She licked salt off the rim of her glass. “I like listening to you.”

I liked what her tongue was doing but I couldn’t allow myself to be distracted. I had much more to teach her.

“The info dump should also be avoided,” I told her, ”especially in dialog.”

“What’s an info dump?”

“An info dump is when the author needs or wants to convey information to the reader and chooses to do it in a block of text rather than parceling it out in bits and pieces as the story progresses.” I took a sip from my margarita and realized she’d already finished half of hers. “It’s especially bad when one character tells the other character something they both already know.”

“Give me an example.”

“As you know, we’re sitting in the bar of Bonita’s, a place you once described as your favorite Mexican restaurant. Bonita’s was opened in 1910 and is still owned and operated by the same family. It started as a hole-in the-wall and has grown significantly since then. What makes Bonita’s unique is that the founding family—the Fitzpatricks—are Irish. It’s the best place in town to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day and Cinco de Mayo.”

I saw a twinkle in the young writer’s eye. Maybe it was my charm. Maybe it was just the alcohol. “I did know all that. So why did you tell it to me?”

“Info dump.”

“Will it be important later in the story?”

“I doubt it.”

She caught the waiter’s attention and ordered two more frozen margaritas. I had barely finished my first one when he arrived with the fresh margaritas.

“What else?” she asked.

“Avoid blathering.”

“What’s blathering?”

“When one character asks a question that can be answered simply, but the second character uses it as a jumping off point to ramble on and on.”

“For example?”

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Jo,” she said. “I was named after my uncle Joe, but my parents dropped the ‘e’ to make my name feminine. My uncle Joe was a cool guy. He taught me to hunt and fish. Well, my uncle Joe and my Dad did. They took to me to Clauson’s farm every summer. The Clausons were my mother’s cousins. My mother never went out there with us. She liked to stay home. She said she enjoyed having a little time to herself. She—” The young writer stopped and looked at me. She had beautiful blue eyes. “I’m blathering, aren’t I?”

I smiled and repeated something she’d said earlier. “I like listening to you.”

This time she reached across the table for my hand and our fingers entwined. Then she wet her lips with the tip of her tongue and looked deep into my eyes.

I cleared my throat. “Of course, most of these rules can be broken if the story warrants it. Sometimes you need a character who stutters or one who blathers. But just one.”

She stroked my palm with the tip of one finger. “What else?”

“Always have a good line to exit the scene.”

Jo lowered her voice. “And what do you have?”

I already knew her answer, but I asked because it was the best way to end the scene. “Would you like to go to my place and see my manuscripts?”

A I on Short Story

Artificial Intelligence once was a concept of science fiction, a thing of the future. Now, it's a creature of the present and we are still learning how to use it.

With the right AI software, anyone can type in "write an article on the elements needed to write a great short story" and then hit ENTER. The software will proceed to write an article on what the software considers to be the elements necessary to write a great short story. If the submitter doesn't like the article for some reason, then he or she can enter the same information and hit ENTER again. The A I software will turn out a different article, ad infinitum.

Okay, so let's see what the software wrote for the first inquiry.

Writing a great short story can be challenging, but it is also an incredibly rewarding experience. Short stories can be powerful tools for exploring complex themes, capturing a moment in time, or simply entertaining readers with a well-crafted tale. Whether you are a seasoned writer or a newcomer to the craft, there are several key elements that can help you create a compelling short story.

   1. A strong opening: The first sentence or paragraph of  your short story should grab the reader's attention and set the tone for what's to come. It should establish the setting, introduce the main character or characters, and hint at the conflict or tension that will drive the plot forward.

   2. Compelling characters: In a short story, there is limited space to develop characters, so it is important to make every word count. Create characters that are unique, interesting, and relatable. Give them clear motivations, distinct personalities, and flaws that make them feel like real people.

   3. A well-developed plot: Your story should have a clear beginning, middle, and end. The plot should be structured in a way that keeps the reader engaged and interested. Avoid predictable or cliched storylines, and strive for a unique and surprising twist or resolution.

   4. Conflict or tension:  Your story should have a central conflict or tension that drives the action forward. This could be a physical or emotional obstacle that the main character must overcome, or it could be a moral dilemma that forces the character to make a difficult decision.

   5. Effective pacing: In a short story, pacing is critical. You need to keep the reader engaged and interested from beginning to end, without rushing or dragging the story out. Use pacing techniques like dialogue, description, action to create a sense of momentum and tension.

   6. A clear theme: A great short story should leave the reader with a clear sense of what it's all about. It should explore a theme or idea that resonates with the reader, whether it is a universal truth about the human condition, a commentary on a current issue, or a personal reflection on life.

   7. Skilled language: Finally, a great short story should be written in skillful and precise language. Choose your words carefully, and use imagery, metaphors, and other literary devices to create a vivid and engaging story. Avoid cliches and overused phrases, and strive for originality and creativity.

In conclusion, a great short story requires careful attention to many different elements from character development and plot pacing, theme, and language. By honing your skills in each of these areas, you can create a story that is both memorable and powerful. Remember that the most important element of any story is its ability to connect with readers on an emotional level, so be true to your own voice and vision, and strive to create a story that will resonate with your audience.

Personally, other than some repetition, I would say the A I software did a good job and covered all the necessary elements. At  this stage in my career, I tend to write instinctively without consciously thinking about the basics, however there are times it probably would not hurt for me to be reminded what the basics are. I think I'll keep this article on file.

I have not played around with having the A I software write a short story to see how well it does. What do you think, will A I programs eventually acquire the ability to put us human writers out of business?

And, if an Artificial Intelligence program does write a short story, who then owns the copyright?

The Digital Detective: Encryption ≠ Encoding

Telex paper tape

The Explainers

Don’t refer to ‘computer codes’. When coaching lawyers for depositions, that became my first rule. I urge the same rule for authors as well. Don’t blow credibility by trying to ‘pluralize’ code with codes– in computerdom the plural of code is still code.

And what kind of code? Source code? Microcode? Machine code? Generic ‘computer code’ is less than meaningless. And while we’re at it, hackers can’s remotely set opponents’ computers on fire, not unless they slip their adversary certain laptops with defective Sony batteries.

To illustrate concepts, real-world analogies appeal to me, but some computer specialites are so abstract, explaining them is difficult. A few software specialists relate systems programming to composing music: Both take place in the originator’s mind, both use symbolic languages and, since the invention of the player piano and now modern mixing consoles, both can be programmed. But analogies can go only so far.

One of the most common questions has proved the most difficult to answer: How are characters stored in the computer? For example, what does “Now is the time” look like inside the machine? Explaining each character has a numeric representation loses some people, but mentioning numbers 0123 are represented as 30313233 (or worse, F0F1F2F3) results in eye-glazing and blood leaking from the ears.

Many programming courses don’t attempt to explain how letters and numbers are recognized and stored in computers. It’s taken for granted and too often they fall back upon, “Do as we say and you’ll do okay.” But that doesn’t answer the question.

Mike Drop

And then… two Michaels came together and showed me the way.

One was Michael Bracken. The other was… Mike Lindell.

Yes, that Michael Lindell, everyone’s favorite mad uncle, the My Pillow Guy. Wait, this is not about politics, I promise. We’re talking about writing.

Mr Lindell has very publicly complained that data in voting machines is secretly encrypted to prevent it being studied. He’s sponsored symposiums with ‘proof’ of skulduggery, and he infamously slandered and libeled voting machine companies, inviting lawsuits with nine decimal zeros in the complaints.

During one interview, Mr Lindell displayed a sample on the screen giving me my first glance at what he was talking about. Could he be correct?

As a writer, I try to get details right, because as a reader, I’ve been yanked out of stories when authors get details wrong. Mr Lindell got it wrong:

Voting machine data isn’t encrypted. It’s encoded.

Wait. Same thing, you say, right? To*mah*to versus To*may*to?

Nope: encoded ≠  encrypted.

Encryption implies obfuscation. It’s how spies try to protect their secrets. It’s how financial institutions are supposed to shield their transactions.

Mikey isn’t all techie and sciencey. I don’t doubt Mr Lindell innocently misunderstood what he saw, but his misunderstanding ‘plain text’ 0123 looks like 30313233 is costing him millions. If a highly visible businessman with political connections doesn’t understand, what about us ordinary readers and writers?

Michael Bracken’s Fault

An upcoming anthology for Michael Bracken required digging into historical events, early radio, and teletypes. I didn’t use teletypery (that’s a word, right?) in my story, but at some point the penny dropped, how to help people visualize character encoding. It’s so simple.

Once upon a time, I communicated by telex with offices in Europe. For quick notes, we’d dial in, tap out a few words and perhaps receive an immediate response. But overseas connection time was expensive, so for long flirtations,^† I mean messages, I’d prepare text on paper tape, then connect and transmit.

And therein lay my solution for anyone to see: encoding on paper tape, a technology a century and a half old. People could see and touch each character as a distinct hole pattern easily converted to a unique number:

hole = binary 1; no hole = binary 0

No Remorse

Morse Code, developed in the 1830s for single-key telegraphy, wasn’t suitable for this new medium. In the 1870s, French engineer Émile Baudot developed a five-bit code. Five bits allows for 2⁵ or 32 distinct characters, but Baudot and the subsequent Morkrum Code (1915) used ‘escape’ characters to switch to and from alphabetic letters mode and numbers-symbols mode, bringing possible combinations closer to sixty, although in practice, far fewer were used. (One of those ‘characters’ rang an attention-getting bell at the other end.)

Baudot paper tape showing shifted values

Morkrum’s new ‘teletypewriter’ was literally a modified typewriter. Morkrum, by the way, is not a person, but rather three people: Joy Morton, founder of Morton Salt, and mechanical engineer Charles Krum, joined by the latter’s son, electrical engineer Howard Krum.

Puzzle Me This

This is paper tape, the stuff of telexes and teletypes, the technology that once powered Western Union, Wall Steel, and news wires. I’ve included only the Roman alphabet, invented a century and a half ago. Each letter has a distinct punch pattern. Curiously, the hole combination for A looks nothing like those for B, C, D, and so on. Each letter’s numeric assignment seems so utterly random as as to defy logic.

Baudot paper tape showing decimal values of alphabet

But there is a logic and I’m betting you can figure it out. Why didn’t Baudot lay out letters one after the other in alphabetical order and bump holes one-by-one?

There is method to the madness. Your challenge is to suggest a reason for these seemingly arbitrary hole assignments.

values of holes

Hint № 1

It helps to know *the earliest* machines had five piano-like keys corresponding to the holes. A teletype operator would press the correct keys one-by-one, and the machine punched holes and advanced the tape.

Hint № 2

Note this sample includes a space character. It’s actually a clue.

Hint № 3

Hover for another clue…

Twitchy Fingers

AT&T developed a machine nearly identical to the Telex but using 7-bit code similar to ASCII and its Unicode descendants. Seven bits allowed for 2⁷ or 128 characters, many of them assigned special purposes. Many universities hung cheap, obsolete TTYs  on their early Unix computers, making an ASCII relationship clearer.

ASCII paper tape with 7-bit values

[Unix aficionados blame those sluggish keyboards for the plethora of ungodly, abstruse Unix commands: awk, chown, df, grep, lp, m4, qalter, renice, uucp, yacc.]

Did It Work?

So does the paper tape comparison help explain how ‘plain text’ data is used and stored in computers? And does the difference between encoding and encryption make sense? Enquiring minds want to know.

Puzzle Answer ↷

Murakami Haruki — Professional Tips

We’ve offered up professional tips from many famous authors, but I don’t recall we’ve published any from Japan. Meet Murakami Haruki (Haruki Murakami in Western notation), award-winning novelist, essayist, and short story writer.

He’s been accused by Japan’s literary elite of being too Western, of being unJapanese. Among his influences are Raymond Chandler, Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Brautigan, and Cormac McCarthy.

From time to time, Murakami has dropped pearls of wisdom vis-à-vis writing. Fortunately author Emily Temple has gathered them into a must-read article. The bullet points are:

Murakami, Haruki

1. Read.
2. Take the old words and make them new again.
3. Explain yourself clearly.
4. Share your dreams.
5. Write to find out.
6. Hoard stuff to put in your novel.
7. Repetition helps (outside of writing).
8. Focus on one thing at a time.
9. Cultivate endurance.
10. Experiment with language.
11. Have confidence.
12. Write on the side of the egg.
13. Observe your world.
14. Try not to hurt anyone.
15. Take your readers on a journey.
16. Write to shed light on human beings.
17. No matter what, it all has to start with talent…
18. … unless you work really hard!

So, starting with admonition № 1, check out the article. Perhaps you’ll find a gem too.

The Shapes of Names to Be

Author Jessica Dall

I bumped into Jessica Dall when I stumbled upon an essay regarding word shapes. I identified when she confessed to being a name nerd. At one time, I’d written a program that harvested 60 000-some names from the web, including numerous details such as meaning, ethnicity, cognates, and variants. One of the basic rules is to avoid giving characters names with the same leading character (which I’ve flagrantly violated in an upcoming AHMM story). But Jessica brought something new (to me). I had to share her with our mystery colleagues.

Jessica Dall is the author of such novels as Forever Bound and The Stars of Heaven. She has written across an array of genres, though her love of history and romance always seems to find a way into her work. Born and raised in southern California, she now resides in Maryland with her husband and daughter. When not living vicariously through her characters, she enjoys travel, crafting, and helping others with their own writing journey.

You can find her on her web site, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

SleuthSayers, I’m pleased to introduce Jessica Dall.

— Leigh

Name Shapes
by
Jessica Dall

 

Picking names for characters is both one of my favorite and one of the most annoying parts of character building when I’m starting a new book. On the first hand, I’m a name nerd. I love looking at popularity lists and name meanings, finding things that would fit the setting I’m creating. On the other hand, names can really affect how a reader connects with a character—sometimes on a subconscious level. Even in the real world, a 2003 study by the University of Chicago found that traditionally “White-sounding” names received fifty percent more interview requests than identical resumes with traditionally “Black-sounding” ones. And when it comes to fiction, there is the added pressure of making sure that (1) you don’t break suspension of disbelief by using a name that feels wildly out of place for your setting (sometimes even when they would actually fit. See “the Tiffany problem”) and (2) you don’t trip a reader up while they are reading.

While this latter point can be a problem simple from a name being very complicated (if you have a fantasy character named F’thasheewerbhion, the reader is most likely either going to need to slow down to try to sound it out, breaking the flow of the story, or just think of the character as “F…whatever” the entire book) it can also be an issue with even common names that are easily confused with one another (for example, Alex and Alec).

One thing you quickly learn as an author when you’re ask to do readings is that you need to practice out loud. This isn’t only to make sure you get the delivery right, but it is the only way to make sure you have the right amount to read for your time slot. Everyone’s reading and speaking speeds obviously differ, but it is easily possible to read an extra hundred words a minute in your head than reading aloud— a difference that quickly stacks up in a ten-, fifteen-, or even thirty-minute reading.

Part of the way that people can read so much more quickly in their heads is that brains often take in the “shape” of familiar words and phrases and fill in what should be there are you move forward. This is how even several rounds of professional editing can sometimes not catch typos like missing or repeated words. Your brain is expecting to read “top of the class,” not “top of class,” and skips over the fact that that isn’t what’s on the page. It is because of this phenomenon that some writers suggest not starting character names with the same letter. Where F’thasheewerbhion may become “F-whatever” to keep the reader from needing to sound it out, even a “simple” name like Alan might register mostly as the “A” with the reader’s brain filling in “Alan” much like it fills in the missing “the” above. If there is then a “Alice” on the same page, a reader subconsciously doing this would need to slow down and figure out which character is doing what versus getting caught up in the action.

Personally, I don’t subscribe to anything that austere. For example, in my most recent novel, Forever Bound, there is both a Cormac and a Colm. While there is possibly some room for confusion, I felt comfortable using both because they don’t have the same name “shape.” While some readers’ brains may take the first letter and run with it, I find it is more common for people to take in the entire shape of the word, even while reading quickly. Because of that, the issue with Alan and Alice isn’t only that they both start with A, but that the shape of the two names is relatively similar. They are an A followed by a “tall” letter (l) and then close to the same number of “short” letters. This makes them visually very similar to a quick reader. Alternatively, “Cormac” is a C followed by all short letters and “Colm” is a shorter name with a tall letter in the third spot. This makes them more visually different even at first glance.

To note, I also took into consideration the fact that these two characters never share a scene together. This separation also makes it less likely for the reader to get tripped up versus in, say, a quick back and forth dialogue. Similarly, I don’t worry about minor characters who aren’t active players in the story as much as I do those often front and center. For example, in another novel, The Stars of Heaven, I have both a João and a John.

Normally, these would be too visually similar for me to feel comfortable using. However, since João is a very minor character, only ever mentioned a few times in exposition, I wasn’t worried about readers getting confused, and thus I felt free to indulge myself (I specifically made the choice since it means that both characters are more or less named John (João is the Portuguese equivalent). Since the book takes place in the eighteenth century, when John was an exceedingly popular name choice, it seemed fitting. I also found it amusing, since both characters are sailors and so linked by the name).

When it comes to naming characters, though, I always suggest writers pay attention not only to if the name fits their setting, but if it will affect readability. A big part of this is paying attention to name shapes. Namely (pun intended), you should look if two names you are using are similar lengths and have tall (e.g. “l, f, b”) short (e.g. “s, r, o”) or long (e.g. “y, g, p”) letters in similar places. Where it’s relatively easy for readers to keep track of who’s speaking when it’s Anne and Alexander having a conversation, it’s going to force some people to backtrack and lose the flow of the story if it’s Alex and Alec. All those little things really help shape the experience of reading the story in a way many don’t think about.

Bloom Where You’re Planted

Richard Helms

Allow me to introduce my friend and wonderful writer, Richard ‘Rick’ Helms, author of a zillion award-winning novels and short stories, a man who’s received more nominations than an Iowa caucus. A former forensic psychologist, he oozes Southern charm and he’s witty and modest as well.

He and his wife Elaine live in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he still muscles out superb stories. You can find more about him on his web site. Now read on…

— Jan Grape

Bloom Where You’re Planted
by
Richard Helms

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”

— Ernest Hemingway

I wrote my first full-length novel forty years ago. It wasn't published for another eighteen years, after going through dozens of submissions and two different agents. The Valentine Profile is still out there, and—being my first work—it's perfectly horribly awful, and I hang my head in shame every time I think about it. Please don't buy it. Or buy a caseload. You do you.

Despite years of disappointment and an almost legendary number of rejections, I persisted, and wrote four or five more novels, which also weren't published for many years. With each new title, I tried to stretch and improve, and each new book was incrementally better than the last.

I was always reminded of Raymond Chandler’s advice to analyze and imitate. Not surprisingly, most of my first half dozen or so novels are extremely derivative of the authors I was reading at the time—Robert Ludlum, David Morrell, David Hagberg, James Lee Burke, Robert B. Parker, and the like. It takes time to find your voice as an author, so for a while you borrow other people’s voices. There are those who still say—and they aren’t far wrong—that my Eamon Gold private eye series is still just Spenser transported to the west coast.

For years, I didn't even consider writing short stories. I didn't think I had the chops. Like many new writers, I presumed that real authors wrote novels—huge sweeping panoramas of human greed, suffering, conflict, passion, and inevitable death. I earned a Russian Studies minor in college—long story—and might have been influenced a bit by Tolstoy. Somewhere in the recesses of my autistic head, short stories were for quitters who put down Anna Karenina on only page 534.

More than that, though, I was convinced I couldn't say everything I wanted to in only a few thousand words. I thought that was a special skill, like shorthand, and I was playing hooky the day they handed it out.

This is really strange, because my most treasured physical possession is a book of—you guessed it—short stories.

It was my first ‘grown-up’ book. We were moving from Charlotte to Atlanta a week or so after I finished first grade, and our neighbors’ oldest son, who might have been twelve at the time, crossed the street as we were packing our car for the move to Georgia. He handed me a paperback book. He probably said something like, “My mom and dad said you like to read and stuff, and I had this lying around, so you can have it, okay?”

I prefer to remember the moment in the same emotional vein as the Lady in the Lake hefting aloft the mighty Excalibur, presenting it to Arthur. It was a turning point in my young life.

The book was Groff Conklin’s Big Book of Science Fiction. It was an anthology cobbled together from classic pulp science fiction magazines of the 1940s. There were stories by Lester Del Rey, Ray Bradbury, John D. McDonald, Murray Leinster, Fredric Brown, Clifford D. Simak, Theodore Sturgeon, and many more. As we tooled down the blue highways between Charlotte and Atlanta, I huddled in the backseat floor—as kids did sixty years ago—and read about robots and rockets and tiny unconscious homunculi used as currency and a funny alien named Mewhu and a man and a dog transformed into Jupiterian beings and time travel and all sorts of amazing concepts I’d never thought of before.

A lot of it didn’t make sense to me and was confusing, but most of it was amazing and astounding and made my little seven-year-old heart flutter. Groff Conklin’s Big Book of Science Fiction was my gateway drug to adult literature and pulp fiction at the same time. Dick and Jane? I didn’t care if they ran. I wanted to know why they ran. Why were they being chased? What horrible thing did they do? Dick and Jane might have been okay for the other second graders. I yearned for more. Groff Conklin’s Big Book of Science Fiction fed that hunger, and for the first time in my life, I understood that stories didn’t just happen, as Richard Brautigan wrote, like lint. Somebody had to write them.

Groff Conklin’s Big Book of Science Fiction is still my most prized physical possession. It resides in a special place on my bookshelf at home. If the house ever catches fire, I will see that Elaine and the cat are out, and then I’ll rescue the book. Everything else can be replaced. This book can’t, for one reason.

Theodore Sturgeon autograph

In 1978, I had dinner at UNC-Greensboro with Theodore Sturgeon and his partner, Lady Jayne. He was a guest of honor at a sci-fi convention at the college. He had written the story “Mewhu’s Jet” in my Sacred Book. I brought the by-then tattered paperback with me, and at a probably clumsy moment I thrust it into his hands and told him the story of how this book changed my reading life—and eventually inspired me to become a writer as well. He took one look at it, and said, “This book has been well-loved”, and he signed the first page of his story.

Sturgeon is long gone now, dead for over forty years. His autograph in my book with the added ‘Q’ with an arrow he used to symbolize “Ask the Next Question” can never be replaced. So the book gets rescued.

As illuminating as it was, Groff Conklin’s Big Book of Science Fiction was also intimidating. To me, the authors in those pages were giants, superhumans endowed with powers far beyond the grasp of mortal scribblers. They captured entire universes in five or six thousand words, and I was not worthy to look upon their visages.

So, I wrote novel after novel after novel. Twenty-five now and counting. Some were squibs. Some were award finalists. Not one of them has ever sold more than 1500 copies. That’s probably my fault, as I am much more comfortable tapping on a keyboard than pressing flesh. A born salesman, I am decidedly not.

In 2006, I decided to start a webzine publishing hardboiled and noir short stories, and solicited submissions on all the usual email listservs, the Facebook and Twitter of the day. Within weeks, I was swamped with submissions, a great number of which had been penned by Edgar and Shamus and Anthony Award winners. I was shocked.

Reading all those stories by such distinguished writers gave me an opportunity again to analyze and imitate. I pulled out my old trusty copy of Groff Conklin’s Big Book of Science Fiction, and I read those stories again as well. As I read, I discovered that the stories that had cowed me so completely decades earlier now made sense. I could recognize the use of a three-act structure and the economy of language in them. I had a little peek underneath the magicians’ capes. I thought, perhaps, I might be able to write in this strange, truncated style after all.

In 2006, I was mowing the grass and came up with an idea for my third Eamon Gold novel. Started working on it, and realized there wasn't enough there for a book, but it might make a nice short story. Longtime buddy Kevin Burton Smith published it on his Thrilling Detective Website, ("The Gospel According to Gordon Black") and it went on to win the Derringer Award that year. I had also written a short story for my own webzine, The Back Alley, entitled "Paper Walls/Glass Houses", and darned if it didn't win the Derringer as well.

No shit, dear readers. My first two published short stories were award winners, and made me one of only two authors ever to win the Derringer in two different categories in the same year. (The other is the incredibly prolific and masterful John Floyd.) Nobody was more surprised than I.

So I wrote another one, based on a failed Pat Gallegher novel, and retitled it "The Gods For Vengeance Cry." On a flyer, I sent it in to Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and by golly Janet Hutchings bought it! It went on to garner nominations for the Derringer, Macavity, and Thriller Awards, and won the 2011 Thriller Award.

Yeah. My first THREE published short stories won awards. The fourth, "Silicon Kings" was also a Derringer finalist.

Clearly, it was time to reevaluate my writing priorities.

For almost a quarter century, before Kevin kindly published "The Gospel According to Gordon Black", I had always presumed that I was first and foremost a novelist, however obscure and failed. I had been conditioned to believe the fallacy that novels hold an exalted spot in literature. While I had enjoyed some limited critical acclaim with my novels, the sudden shocking success of the short stories left me wondering whether I had wasted thirty years of my writing life.

It’s a good thing I’m not into regrets.

Over the last fifteen years, I've embraced the idea that I might actually be a short story writer who dabbles in writing novels. I have six Shamus Award nominations (and one win) for my novels, but my short stories have garnered a mind-boggling fourteen nominations, and have won the Thriller, Shamus, and Derringer Awards. One story I wrote for anthology editor and master story craftsman Michael Bracken (“See Humble and Die”, in The Eyes of Texas, for Down and Out Books) was selected for the 2020 edition of Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt’s Best American Mystery Stories, edited by Otto Penzler and C. J. Box.

And the hits just keep coming. Several years ago, the Republican National Convention was held in my hometown of Charlotte, NC. As happens in many cities, Charlotte made a concerted effort to get rid of the many homeless people who cluster each night along uptown Tryon Street, because images of people sleeping on bus stop benches make for bad national TV. I read an article about it in the news, and my first thought was that sweeping the streets of homeless people might make an excellent cover for a murder. Kill a homeless guy, hide the body, and everyone would think he was just given ‘Greyhound Therapy’—a bus ticket and twenty bucks to go somewhere (anywhere) else.  I let the idea cook in my head for a week or two, mostly coming up with a compelling protagonist, and then I started typing. I threw in some stories I’d heard about living on the streets from my hippie buddies back in the early 1970s. The resulting story, "Sweeps Week" (EQMM, July August 2021) won the Shamus this year, and is a finalist for the Macavity at Bouchercon next week.

My wife said, “You know, you might have a knack for this.”

Sometimes I have to shake my head when I realize that one story in EQMM is seen (and hopefully read) by more people than have read all my novels put together. That's humbling, but also exciting. Unlike each new book, which might flop or fly, or even go completely ignored, the stories are being read. Nothing is more important to a writer.

I still write novels. Earlier this year, Level Best Books’ New Arc imprint published A Kind and Savage Place, which traces the evolution of civil rights in the south as experienced by the citizens of a small North Carolina farming community. Next year, their Historia imprint will publish Vicar Brekonridge, a novel based on my Derringer Award-nominated EQMM short story “The Cripplegate Apprehension.” I recently finished a massive novel called 22 Rue Montparnasse, about the Lost Generation in post-WWI Paris, and I’m about ready to set sail on another novel about Laurel Canyon in the 1960s, inspired by the music of the late Nashville songwriter Larry Jon Wilson. None of these, with the possible exception of Vicar Brekonridge, is a traditional mystery story. Writing mystery short stories has freed me to explore other genres in my novel-length works, and to write the more mainstream and historical stories that I’ve back-burnered for years.

For now, though, my plan is to spend 2023 focused mostly on short stories. I’ve discovered that they are intensely rewarding. In what other medium can you come up with an idea on Tuesday, write “The End” on Friday, and people will buy it (hopefully)? In the same way I truly enjoy diving into massive amounts of research for a sweeping historical novel, I love the spontaneous nature of short stories. They’re almost like zen paintings, executed in seconds only after days of contemplation. The typing is only the last stage of storytelling. First, the story has to live inside your head. As Edward Albee once taught me in a master class, “Never put a sentence on the page until it can write itself.”

Living on the autistic spectrum, it would have been easy to stay rigidly glued to the novel-writing path. Comforting, even. Stability, structure, and adherence to a long-standing pattern of behavior is kind of a big deal among my neurodivergent tribe. Gritting my teeth, shutting my eyes, holding my breath, and breaking out and trying something new fifteen years ago turned out to make a huge difference in my writing life, and opened the door to a level of authorly satisfaction I had never known before.

My point is this (and it doesn't apply only to writing): The secret of happiness, I think, is to find your sunny spot and bloom where you're planted. If you beat your head against a door for years without an answer, maybe you're at the wrong door. I spent twenty-five relatively unhappy years working as a clinical/forensic psychologist, but only found career joy when I followed my true calling and became a teacher. Likewise, when I embraced short stories, the flower of my writing career blossomed.

Sometimes, it's a good idea to step back, survey the Big Picture, and figure out exactly where you fit into it, as opposed to where you want to fit. Life has a way of showing you the paths you need to tread, if you’re open to looking for them. A simple jink to the left or right could change your entire life. But, wherever you land, it should be the place that makes you happiest. Living as a tortured literary artist slaving in a dusty garret may be a romantic notion, but it isn’t much fun.

Sometimes, you win by trading one dream for another.

A Loose Compendium of the Worst Writing Advice Ever

So I recently watched a video by Paul Davids,  a musician I follow on YouTube, with the intriguing title: "The WORST musical advice ever given." Davids, an accomplished musician in his own right, went to a trade show in Anaheim, and recorded a number of musicians, well-known and obscure alike, to respond to the prompt question in no more than thirty seconds. 

The results were pretty entertaining (If you have the time, go take a look. It's not very long, and wellworth your investment), and surprisingly not far off from some of the advice I received when starting out as a new writer. And that got me thinking: what would the responses to this sort of prompt be from writer types?

So I put it out there, and got a lot of interesting responses. I've posted them below, with attribution of at least the name of the writer giving the response, with more if I knew it/could find quickly. So let's take a look, and once we've worked our way through these responses, I'll top it off with my own take on "The worst writing advice I've ever received."

Here we go!

***********

Worst for me? “NEVER EVER use exclamation points.”

I say, what about “Help. I’m drowning.” versus “Help! I’m drowning!”?

For sure, don’t overuse them, but sometimes they’re appropriate.

 – James W. Ziskin ANTHONY, BARRY, & MACAVITY Award-winning author of the Ellie Stone Mysteries. Finalist for the EDGAR, AGATHA, and LEFTY Awards.

Syd Fields in his screenwriting book says avoid bummer endings. And that killed humanist film making in the US per screenwriter/producer Kirk Ellis (John Adams, Into the West). And it wasn't just films that suffered, in my opinion.

 – David Corbett Recovering Catholic, NYT  Notable author of THE ART OF CHARACTER, six novels, dozens of stories, numerous scripts, and too many poems.

Show Don't Tell. In reality it should be Show AND Tell.

 – Robert Gregory Browne, Bestselling author of  the TRIAL JUNKIES series and the FOURTH DIMENSION THRILLERS. Co-founder and Creative Director at Braun Haus Media, LLC.

Over my career as a playwright, a few have suggested I end a play with a “button.” But I’ve learned how hollow those throwaway tags can feel. It’s better to leave the audience with an open loop (some mystery, a question) so they are still “activated” long after “end of play.”

 – Audrey Cefaly, Calicchio Prize-winning and Pulitzer-nominated playwright.

I did a whole presentation on this at @WCSUWritingMFA...but, basically, any "viral" writing rule is horseshit...there is only ONE rule..."does it work?"

 – Matthew Quinn Martin Author of the NIGHTLIFE series, and sometime screenwriter.

I was told early on to get a fall back job.  I disliked the advice and ignored it.  By my mid-20s I was making a living writing freelance, getting grants and being paid to write a feature film.  You cannot retreat if you have a fall back position.  Always go forward.

 – Richard Vetere Author of the novels THE WRITER'S AFTERLIFE and CHAMPGAGNE AND COCAINE. 

"Write what you know." Bad because it's so limiting, and destroys the joy of discovering and exploring worlds (or stories rather) that you don't know...yet.

 – Robert Alexander Wray, Marc A. Klein Award-winning playwright of over a dozen works, including LOOKING GLASS ELEGY and MELANCHOLY ECHO.

There is a great deal of bad advice on Pinterest. Some of the worst is never use big words, do not use adverbs or adjutives, keep all sentences to three words.

 – Art Rickard

You can’t edit till you finish a novel. I get why, but it’s just not my process and I lost time trying to do it this way.

 – Robin Lemke

Any writing advice that tells me I MUST do this or that - whether it's writing an outline, zero draft, or whatever. Leave me alone, I'll write my own way, thank you.

 – Marty Wingate

"Bad" advice: Any pressure or encouragement to plot/outline.

Reasoning: Outlining demotivates me, creates extra work that isn't useful to the process I follow, and (for me specifically) it removes some of the humor/zing/unexpectedness from my work.

 – Kate Baray

Worst advice ever: “Do as much research as possible before you write even one word.” For years, I wasted months on research before writing “even one word.” It was a way to procrastinate and we writers are experts at procrastination. When I finally actually started the writing, I’d often discover that because the plot wasn’t working or the characters didn’t come alive, I’d have to start all over, often not needing or using any of the material. In a workshop facilitated by Elizabeth George, she advised to FIRST spend time & energy on character development/exploration and plotting because readers connect with characters, second with plot, and lastly with the areas that need research. “Focus your time and energy on the actual craft of writing,” she advised, “and not the technical stuff.”

 – Shannon Walker

Write what you know. If that advice had been followed we'd never have had Tarzan, Conan, and many others.

 – Bob Napier

Any absolute rule. Never do prologues or flashbacks

 – Leslie Hall, writing instructor and author of the Kaitlyn Willis Roadsigns Mysteries

"Never use any dialog tag other than 'said'" pisses me off every time. "Said" is too narrow and bland for sarcasm, fury, pain, desperation, or fear.

 – Kat Richardson, author of the bestselling GREYWALKER novels.

Any advice that begins with the words "always" or "never."

 – J. R. Sanders

Two pieces of contradictory advice: 1. If you want to sell a manuscript, read what editors are currently publishing and write something like that. 2. Don't chase trends. By the time you write your story, the editors will be sick of it and switch to a new trend.

 – Thomas P. Hopp, scientist and author of such modern day disaster epics as RAINIER ERUPTS! and THE GREAT SEATTLE EARTHQUAKE.

"Spend more than your advance on promo." Bad, BAD advice. Took me years and cashing in an old IRA to pay it off.

 –Jeri Westerson, author of the Crispin Guest medieval mystery series.

Not me, but a friend was told by his high school English teacher to always use as many qualifiers as possible, that way no one can ever prove you wrong.

 – Larry Cebula

Senior year of college, "First Novels" class teacher: "You seem to be using humor to hide from true emotion." Almost ended me as a writer, took nearly twenty years to recover from.

 – Cornelia Read, author A FIELD OF DARKNESS and THE CRAZY SCHOOL.

"Get a real job."

 – Bill Fitzhugh, former radio comedian, DJ, and author of HEART SEIZURE, HUMAN RESOURCES, and THE ORGAN GRINDERS. 

"Write what you know." Makes for a very boring book.

 – Michael W. Sherer, author of the Blake Sanders thriller series.

"Write what you know." Should be: "Write what you know or can find out."

 –Ed Goldberg

Write what you loathe.

 – Michael Fowles

"Write better."

 – Justin D. Park

"Keep your day job."

 – Elizabeth Sims

"Write while you hold down a job." I wrote a little, but it wasn't very good because I have to do rewrites and "rethinks."

 – Marilyn Holt

"Write what you know."

 – David B. Schlosser

Last, but not least, I received the following from my old friend and fellow Sleuthsayer R.T. Lawton, who has been under the weather lately, and to whom I am wishing the speediest of recoveries. Too good not to share in its entirety! Thanks R.T.!

The worst writing advice I received, came from two different university English professors.

The first professor gave me a D in his creative writing class and told me I would never learn to write. Finding that I had other talents which would serve me well in a subsequent career, this final grade never appeared on my graduation transcript. Don’t ask.

As for the second professor, I had returned from my two years, nine months, twenty-nine days with the army, having been granted a sixty-day drop in order to go back to college. Shortly after arriving on campus, I took some of my war poems to the English Department and conversed with a professor. He read the poems and politely did not encourage me to continue in this endeavor. His point was made, so be it.

This does not mean my current published work is anything close to literary. Let’s just say it is commercially bent and that the two professors merely had a different view on the subject at that point in time as they looked down from their ivory towers.

It was about five years after graduation from university that I read a short story in a biker magazine, told myself I could do better and sat down to write. The process was longhand on a yellow legal pad with many scissor cuts and subsequent joining with Scotch tape, so that no two pages were the same length. The original cut- and-paste method. And, yes, I did hunt-and-peck the manuscript out on an electric typewriter before submitting by snail-mail. The biker magazine bought and published the story. I was on my way.

Had I taken the advice of those two professors, then I would never have had the pleasure of meeting at conferences, chaptermeetings, critique groups and readings all those wonderful people who write. A very interesting group. I would not have had over160 published short stories. I would also not have had the privilege of Edgar setting on my writing desk, nor of being nominated for a Macavity.

Work hard, learn and follow your dreams.

 – R.T. Lawton, Edgar Award-winning short story writer.

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And how's that for a last word? 

Thanks to all who chimed in. And if you've got a good piece of bad writing advice, feel free to weigh in in the comments section below.

See you in two weeks!