Taking revision to the next level

by Elizabeth Zelvin

I continue to be amazed and pleased that sixty-odd years after I first said I wanted to be a writer and four years since my first mystery publication, the road to learning my craft, especially as a fiction writer, is still rolling out before me. I would much rather be a writer of whom readers say, “She gets better and better,” than one who “never lived up to the promise of her first book.” And while I’ll leave it to others to judge my published work, I’m proud to say that I’m getting better and better at revision.

I might never have understood that revision is an essential part of writing if I had never taken the risk of subjecting my work to critique. I can’t say this didn’t come up until I started writing fiction. Back in the 1970s, when I was actively writing poetry, I was part of a workshop group that met monthly to critique each other’s work. I remember the group’s very lively discussion of one of my poems. It was a divorce poem (murder mysteries aren’t the only way a writer can get revenge) that later appeared in my first book. The memorable part is that when the group got through with it, and I’d gone back and rewritten it incorporating their suggestions, it was exactly the same poem—except that all the words were different.

I did a lot of tinkering with my first mystery while it was making the rounds for four years, having made the mistake of sending out my first draft. But the big revision came when an editor with a major publisher told me one of my alternating co-protagonists was terrific, but the other would do much better as a sidekick. This opportunity was too good not to grab, especially as I’d had a lot of rejections by that time. I had to rethink half the chapters and decide in each of them whether to give the scene to the other protagonist, tell it from his point of view, or turn it into a close third-person scene for the sidekick. It made the manuscript much, much better, and another editor at the same house eventually took it. Although it was an enormous revision, I found it went a lot quicker than writing the first draft. I already knew the story—I just had to change the words.

Writing and revising Voyage of Strangers, my still unpublished historical novel about a young marrano sailor with Columbus, proved a voyage of discovery beyond my previous horizons. I had to put the flesh of my fictional characters and their story on the skeleton of what really happened to real people on a historical time line, rather than building on a structure of crime, investigation, and solution.

I had my protagonist and his sister in my head for more than a year before I wrote the story. When they talked to me, I’d jot down whatever they said. And I was reading and rereading my sources and becoming familiar with the chronology of the historical events. I wrote the first draft easily—first time that’s ever happened. Then a couple of respected early critiquers said they thought the first half of the book needed work.

I rewrote. I tried to make the scenes more suspenseful. I added action, texture, and a character or two. I had to think more about pace and structure. I understood that giving the first half of the story as much momentum as the second was crucial. The most dramatic events in the Indies actually happened. Readers agreed I got the second half right the first time. But to get there, readers had to hang on and cross that ocean. I had to keep them turning pages as my fictional characters made their way across Spain, having fictional adventures.

I had to start the story in a different place. I had to take sections—multi-part scenes—in which the narrative moved gently along and make something happen, something dramatic, conflictual, suspenseful. I started with a nice clean hard copy of my previous draft. But I soon discovered that I wasn’t editing. I had to retell these parts of the story from scratch, without referring to the old text. This time, revision meant rewriting. To my surprise, it went as smoothly as creating the first draft had. Although I was making up new incidents, I knew the characters and the story well enough to choose among various ways that I might tell it.

The biggest surprise is one I attribute to all the years of writing and revising and trying to be open to critique and hearing other writers talk about their craft leading up to this moment when I absolutely had to change what I’d written to something better. You know how writers struggle with the need to “kill their darlings”? We hate to relinquish the well-turned phrase, the sparkling line of dialogue, the oh-so-clever joke. My revelation: there were hardly any darlings at all that I couldn’t bear to let go. And that freed me to write the same story with not only different scenes and incidents, but different (and I hope better) words.

The Accidental Accent Thief

A Symphony of Subtleties

Akwaaba means "Welcome" in Twri, the language of the Ashanti
In Ghana, West Africa

Accents, in my opinion, are comprised of subtle linguistic aspects. But, when these subtle aspects—of tonal inflection, word choice, phraseology, and myriad other factors—combine, they can team-up to dominate the way a person speaks. The greater the linguistic domination, the “heavier” we say a person’s accent is. That’s the way I see it. And, I have a certain feel for accents. After all …

I’m An Accent Thief 

I don’t do it on purpose; it just happens. Put me in a room with somebody who has an accent, and before too long I’ve caught that accent the same way a hypochondriac might catch a cold. Instead of becoming infected with my conversation-partner’s sniffles, I’m speaking with his twang, maybe dropping certain parts of words, unintentionally borrowing certain phrases, widening my mouth when I make a vowel sound, or perhaps accumulating schwas.

Sometimes this comes in handy. When I was stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, for instance, I quickly discovered that many local mechanics tended to automatically raise their rates when working on cars that belonged to folks who “ain’t from aroun-cheer.” So, I made it a habit to drop into a drawl as soon as I hopped out of my convertible at the repair shop. The “Fellowship of the Ya’ll,” as I called it, earned me good discounts on new brakes and other necessities.

On other occasions, however, my odd tendency to capture accents leads to embarrassment. I recall speaking to a British gentleman who suddenly cut me off (something I’ve noticed Brits rarely do) to ask: “Are you making sport of me?” (I don’t think he used the word “sport,” though. But, I can’t remember the word he did use.) I apologized, and explained that I tended to “catch accents” but didn’t mean to poke fun at anyone. In fact, I hadn’t realized I was doing it, until he called my attention to it.

After a moment he said, “I see. So, you’re a bit like a human Macaw, then, aren’t you? Or mynah bird, perhaps.”

My automatic response? “Snap!” We both burst into laughter.

While teaching at the Venezuelan Commando (Cazador, or “Hunter”) School, my buddies and I liked to frequent a nearby café, where the waitress was happy to serve me “Peksi Lijera” (Pepsi Light). I spoke to her quite a bit, and learned to order my “Peksi” early-on. In fact, I accidentally acquired quite a bit of her accent. Unfortunately, the reason she said “Peksi” instead of “Pepsi” was because she had a speech impediment—which I also temporarily acquired, thinking it was part of the local dialect!

Foreign Dialects

When studying Arabic, at the Defense Language Institute, we spent the first twelve months learning to read, write and speak Modern Standard Arabic. This is basically the language of the Qur’an.

After that, we broke into smaller classes and focused on individual dialects for the next six months. The dialect I studied was the one spoken in Egypt (a nation pronounced “Musr” in Arabic, with the “s” held for an extra half-beat, compared to most contemporary English usage, and wrapped into a breathy, brief, relatively un-voiced, trilled “r” sound). This was the first time I’d been introduced to an in-depth study of dialectal differences in language, and I found it fascinating—if somewhat over my head.

The most interesting case of dialectal differences I ran into, however, was in Africa.

The nation of Ghana
Capital City:  Accra

On our first full day in Ghana, we were taken to a museum and introduced to the “Twri of Ashanti.” (At this point, I should probably point out that Twri can evidently sometimes also be written or pronounced: “Chee” or “Tshee”, or “Twee”—but, I was taught it as “Twri”, so that’s what I’ll use here.)

The word “Twri” is—surprisingly, perhaps, for a westerner—pronounced just as it looks. The word begins with the “tw” sound we use in the word “Twine”.

The “wr” sound takes that unvoiced w sound from the word “twine” (minus any vowel-ing, of course: just the “w?” part of the w sound in the shorter word “wine”). Then, this w sound is rolled into the back-of-the-mouth, mid-to-upper-throat part of the r sound we use at the beginning of the word “roar.” Now, combine the two sounds, transitioning from the w sound into the r sound without stopping in the middle. Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger if it takes a bit of practice to learn to smoothly transition between w and r sounds.

The “i” sound is pronounced “ee”, so the entire word “Twri” comes out sounding a lot like the English word “Tree” except that it has a w sound between the t and the r. In fact, as I later discovered, this word “Twri” is the “English” word that many people in Ghana often use when talking about a tree in the forest—which helped me more fully understand why the person explaining the “Twri of Ashanti” was, at the time, standing and pointing at a giant tree painted on the two-story wall of the museum as he did so.

That painted tree was shaped similar to the tree seen on the right, but each leaf held the name of a village, while the trunk had the word Ashanti painted on it, and some of the major branches carried other names.

The painting was designed to illustrate how the language of the Ashanti peoples (Twri) had branched into many dialects—some primarily used by peoples other than the Ashanti (hence the names painted on some of the larger branches).

Ghana is not a giant country; in fact it’s area is smaller than that of the state of Oregon. Because the people had only low-speed transportation for hundreds of years, however, coupled with sometimes rather inhospitable terrain, villages were often relatively isolated. This physical isolation resulted in relative linguistic isolation, creating linguistic differences between villages to an extraordinary extent, particularly when one considers the limited area they are all contained within.

The Ashanti region of Ghana

These differences are so great, in fact, that many people I met there did not consider each village to have its own dialect, but rather its own language. I met far more than one person who told me he spoke over twenty languages. Usually, he might speak English, French and Twri—but instead of saying he spoke Twri, he’d then start listing all the village dialects he spoke. Which is not to say that the village dialects weren’t quite different from each other.

My A-Team was there to teach a leadership class to NCO’s in the Ghana Army. We worked in Akim Achiaze (Ah-keem Ah-chee-ah-zay). Akim means village, town or city. Achiaze was the name of the town outside the base where we worked. But, depending on where one came from, Achiaze was pronounced: “Ah-chee-ah-zay”, “Uh-chazzee”, “Ah-chee-ah-zee”, “Ah-kee-ah-zee”, “Ah-kah-shee”, etc.

What Does This Have to do With Writing?

One of the most esoteric concepts in writing, imho, is “voice.” And, somehow, there seems to be a connection between accents and voices—including the written “voice”—which runs much deeper than just a twang.

As I wrote earlier in this essay, an accent can cause subtleties to combine in a domineering way. This changes my speaking voice. In my own experiences as an accidental accent thief, I’ve noticed that slipping into another accent sometimes even shifts the tonal range of my voice several octaves up or down the scale. It influences word choice, phraseology, sometimes even paragraph order.

Tone, word choice, phraseology, paragraph or word order—it’s beginning to sound as if we’re talking about aspects of written “voice” here, doesn’t it?

I found myself explaining this to someone, a few days ago, when he asked me if I read books or short stories when I was working on a story or novel. I answered that I did read while working, but had to be careful not to read anything with a “conflicting voice.”

Answering my friend’s subsequent question (“What the hell does conflicting voice mean?”), led me to explain that I’m not just an accent thief. In writing, I have to be very careful not to let the voice of my work be unintentionally altered by the voice of something else. Further, if I read something that has a voice totally alien to the voice I’m writing in, it can completely derail my project until I can get that other voice out of my head—which can take awhile.

A Final Thieving Smile

About six months ago, I spotted a visitor in our church, here in Scottsdale, who had scars on his face that told me he was a chief’s son—if he came from Ghana. His eyes lit up when I said hello in Twri, and after he responded in kind we shook hands, snapping our fingers off each other (a common Ghana practice, I believe) then gave each other the “thumbs-up” while saying, “Ay-yea” which means roughly “yes” or “okay”.

We called each other “Medonfo!” (may-dawn-foe) then, meaning “my friend” and hugged (another common practice in Ghana, I believe). But, when he asked where I’d learned to speak Twri, he professed not to know where Akim Achiaze was. Undaunted, I began listing all the ways I’d heard it pronounced, and when I said, “Akim Uh-chazzee” he clapped his hands and cried, “Uh-chazzie! Where they have the Army Jungle School—it’s way back in the bush!” 

He knew the place, alright. He just wasn’t used to hearing it pronounced in an Achiaze accent. And, since that’s where I’d spent almost all my time in Ghana, that’s the stolen accent I spoke.

See you in two weeks!
--Dixon

Happy Halloween!

by Brian Thornton

Or should that read, "Happy All Hallows Eve"?

Most everyone is familiar with the history of this holiday, an anachronistic throw-back to times when the dark of night was barely cut by the brightest of candles or bonfires. To a time when human beings were much more likely to run from a report of a goblin sighting than running to take pictures of it.

Let's face it, there's something visceral in us (and don't ask me to explain the biochemistry of it all here, because if you're waiting for that, you're in for a looooong wait!) that reacts strongly and positively to a good scare. Whether it's tied in with the notion of Thanatos, the so-called "death impulse," I can't say.

I just know that there is something enticing, enthralling, and horrifying about the supernatural. Modern science notwithstanding, we are only a few generations out of the cave, a blink of the eye in the life-span of a species.

As a result, logic provides no succor in the split second that something terrifying (like a zombie, ghoul, or even, for some folks, clowns) jumps out at us. What we're experiencing in that split second is something that ties us inexorably to those ancestors who made the first paintings on cave walls.

I'm opening up the comments section to ask the following three questions, in honor or All Hallows Eve:

1. What scares you? REALLY scares you?

2. Is there a favorite Halloween-themed book or movie you revisit every year?

3. What is the scariest "new" thing you've read or seen this year?

Here are my answers:

1. The Borg, from Star Trek. The notion of losing my individuality on that level is truly unsettling for me.

2. Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein (movie) and The Night Stalker (book) by Jeff Rice (no relation to Anne Rice). This is the book upon which they based the Darren McGavin TV movies/series about Karl Kolchak.

3. "At the Mountains of Madness," by H.P. Lovecraft. Read it this week. My first time reading it. Lovecraft does a masterful job of taking what starts out as a rather mundane academic recounting of an expedition to Antarctica by scholar/explorers from the fictional Miskatonic University, and slowly ratcheting up the tension as layer after layer of the everyday is stripped away, until the climax, with the narrator and a colleague running pell-mell down an ancient, alien-built subterranean corridor with a shapeless, faceless prehistoric horror called a "Shoggoth" hot on their heels. Well worth a read, if you're not familiar with his work. (Especially today of all days!;) )

So how about it, dear readers. What are your three answers to my three questions?

Happy Halloween!

Media Blitz

by Robert Lopresti

A long time ago, Robert Benchley wrote the following about his most famous piece, "The Treasurer's Report:" I have inflicted it on the public in every conceivable way except over the radio and dropping it from airplanes.  (And as proof, here is a short, hilarious movie version.)

I am thinking about that because this autumn is seeing my own work coming at the public from a variety of directions.  Not to worry; the phase will pass and by December I will sink back into obscurity.  But let's go over the details of my temporary onslaught.

As I wrote last time, September marked my first appearance in an e-book anthology.  I am sure by now you have all run out (or run your cursor over) to buy a copy of Malfeasance Occasional: Girl Trouble.  Right?

I am happy to inform you you won't have to spend any money for this next feature (although I do like dark chocolate if you're thinking of a gift).  This one is a freebie.

Linda Landrigan, who edits Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, suggested doing a podcast of my story "Snake in the Sweetgrass," which appeared in the December 2003 issue of AHMM.  And if it isn't up now here  it should be by next week.


She sent me the recorder they use and after much diligent practice I was able to record the story with only three mistakes.  And that was the best I could do.  Three different mistakes every time.  (It wasn't like I consistently tripped over the same tongue-twisting phrase, alas.)  Linda assures me they can clean that up.

But here is the cool part.  My story is about an elderly Kentucky fiddler and the title refers to a traditional fiddle piece that is his personal signature tune.  It seemed logical to include a recording of that tune in the podcast.

The problem with that is that I made up the name.  There is no such tune. 

No biggie.  My daughter, Susan Weiner, is a fine composer so she created a tune that matched the description in the story.  And then, extra special treat, my wife Terri Weiner recorded it on the fiddle.

So it is a real family operation and I recommend it highly.  But if that isn't enough to entice you to give it a listen, here is a bonus.  Remember, I said this is a media blitz. 

The January/February issue of Hitchcock's comes out November 4 and I am thrilled to report that the cover story is "Devil Chased The Wolf Away," a sequel to "Snake."  And while you can read "Devil" without experiencing "Snake" you will definitely enjoy them more if you read (or listen to) "Snake" first.

And next Wednesday I will explain how "Devil" came to be written, much to my surprise.

Magna Cum Murder

I spent last weekend among old friends.  I attended Magna Cum Murder, a mystery conference that's been held in Indiana for the past nineteen years.  For at least its first decade, Magna was based at the Roberts Hotel in Muncie.  The Roberts was a great old pile from the 1920s, with a potted-palm lobby out of an Edward Hopper painting.  One of the conference legends has Mary Higgins Clark and friends singing around a lobby piano being played by Les Roberts (the PI writer, not the guy who owned the hotel).  The Roberts also had the perfect bar for a small conference: big enough to hold a bunch of mystery writers and small enough to make them rub elbows.  I fondly remember sitting at that bar with Ralph McInerny, watching a World Series game.  Can't remember who was playing.

View of the Roberts Lobby, Showing the Mary Higgins Clark Piano

When the Roberts Hotel closed, Magna soldiered on using Muncie's convention center and a collection of satellite motels.  But as the Bouchercon occasionally proves, it's hard to do a convention without a central hotel.  This year, Magna moved to Indianapolis, to a private club older than the Roberts, the Columbia Club.  Though the club is private, it was open to Magna attendees, and the result was something very like Magnas of old.

The Columbia Club, New Home to Magna Cum Murder

The driving force behind Magna is Kathryn Kennison, a great friend to mystery writers and book lovers in general.  Kathryn set Magna's classy and welcoming tone back in 1994, and has maintained it ever since.  And every year she works the miracle of drawing a big-name guest of honor to a small Midwestern conference.  This year's honoree was Steve Hamilton.  Our banquet speaker was Hank Phillippi Ryan.  They still come to Indiana for Kathryn.



Guest of Honor Interview:  Hank Phillippi Ryan and Steve Hamilton

A big advantage of a small conference for the writer is the opportunity to speak with a good percentage of the attendees.  That's assuming you "work the room," making yourself available to fans and doing such daring things as sitting down at a table full of strangers.  It's not the easiest leap for some writers to make, including this writer.  Small conferences are good for the fans and for aspiring writers (as yet unpublished writers, someone called them this weekend) because of this same intimacy.



Magna's First Panel: John Desjarlais, Albert Bell, Molly Weston, William Kent Krueger, and Unidentified Moderator 

One of the reasons I sometimes fail to work the room at Magna is that I'm too busy catching up with writers I only see there. (I'm not naming names for fear of leaving someone out.) As important as book promoting is, it's also important for me to keep in touch with writers I admire, to be encouraged by success stories and to condole over the frustrations of the writing life. This year, I even got to watch another World Series game in another Magna bar.  (And yes, I do remember who was playing.)

Two Award-winning Writers, Sandra Balzo and Ted Hertel, Jr.,and Two Distinguished
 Critics, Gary Warren Niebuhr (holding his favorite book) and Ted Fitzgerald

Next time you're on Facebook, check out the Magna Cum Murder page.  You'll see some very professional photos of the attendees and of the Columbia Club (unlike the grainy group shots reproduced here, which were made with my very small camera.)  And if you're looking for a weekend away with new old friends next fall, consider Magna's twentieth anniversary celebration in October.  Next year's details should be available soon on Magna's web site, along with an online registration form.  I'll remind you later.   

More of the Favorites

More of the Favorite Mysteries of the Century

In case you've forgotten, the 100 favorites were chosen by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association.  The book was published in 2000 and edited by Jim Huang.









1960-1969

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
A Stranger in My Grave by Margaret Millar (1960)
The Spy Who Came In From The Cold by John le Carre (1963)
The Deep Blue Good-Bye by John D, MacDonald (1964)
The Chill by Ross MacDonald (1964)
In The Heat of the Night by John Ball (1965)
Cotton Comes to Harlem by Chester Himes (1965)

1970-1979

Time And Again by Jack Finney (1970)
The Laughing Policeman by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo (1970)
No More Dying Then by Ruth Rendell (1971)
An Unsuitable Job For a Woman by P.D. James (1972)
Sadie When She Died by Ed McBain (1972)
Dark Nantucket Noon by Jane Langton (1975)
Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters (1975)
The Sunday Hangman by James McClure (1977)
Edwin of the Iron Shoes by Marcia Muller (1977)
The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley (1978)
Chinaman's Chance by Ross Thomas (1978)
Whip Hand by Dick Francis (1979)
One Corpse Too Many by Ellis Peters (1979)

1980-1989

Looking For Rachel Wallace by Robert B. Parker (1980)
Thus Was Adonis Murdered by Sarah Caudwell (1981)
The Man With a Load of Mischief  by Martha Grimes (1981)
Death by Sheer Torture by Robert Barnard (1982)
The Man Who Liked Slow Tomatoes by K.C. Constantine (1982
 "A" Is For Alibi by Sue Grafton (1982)
The Thin Woman by Dorothy Cannell (1984)
Deadlock by Sara Paretsky (1984)
Strike Three You're Dead by R.D. Rosen (1984)
When the Bough Breaks by Jonathan Kellerman (1985)
Sleeping Dog by Dick Lochte (1985)
When the Sacred Ginmill Closes by Lawrence Block (1986)
Tourist Season by Carl Hiaasen (1986)
The Ritual Bath by Faye Kellerman (1986)
Rough Cider by Peter Lovesey (1986)
The Monkey's Raincoat by Robert Crais (1987)
Old Bones by Aaron Elkins (1987)
The Killings at Badger's Drift by Caroline Graham (1987)
Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow (1987)
A Great Deliverance by Elizabeth George (1988)
The Silence of the Lamb by Thomas Harris (1988)
A Thief of Time by Tony Hillerman (1988)
Death's Bright Angel by Janet Neel (1988)
Black Cherry Blues by James Lee Burke (1989)

1990-1999

Get Shorty by Elmore Leonard (1990)
If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O by Sharyn McCrumb (1990)
Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley (1990)
Sanibel Flats by Randy Wayne White (1990)
Aunt Dimity's Death by Nancy Atherton (1992)
Booked to Die by John Dunning (1992)
Bootlegger's Daughter by Margaret Maron (1992)
The Ice House by Minette Walters (1992)
Track of the Cat by Nevada Barr (1993)
The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie R. King (1993)
Child of Silence by Abigail Padgett (1993)
The Concrete Blonde by Michael Connelly (1994)
The Yellow Room Conspiracy by Peter Dickenson (1994)
One For The Money by Janet Evanovich (1994)
Mallory's Oracle by Carol O'Connell (1994)
A Broken Vessel by Kate Ross (1994)
Who in the Hell is Wanda Fuca? by G. M. Ford (1995)
Vanishing Act by Thomas Perry (1995)
Blue Lonesome by Bill Pronzini (1995)
Concourse by S.J. Rozan (1995)
Darkness, Take My Hand by Dennis Lehane (1996)
The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte (1996)
A Test of Wills by Charles Todd (1996)
Dreaming of the Bones by Deborah Crombie (1997)
Blood at the Root by Peter Robinson (1997)
On Beulah Height by Reginald Hill (1998)

 I know some of you might complain that your favorite author isn't listed.  Please remember this list was compiled by the mystery bookstore owners or managers or staff. The bookstores were all members of the Independent  Mystery Booksellers Association. And the selections were not necessarily best-sellers. These were the favorites of each store and some members picked on the criteria of "what books would I want to have if I were stranded on a desert island." Sometimes, if the author had a continuing character, then the first in the series was listed, when that author had repeats from more than one store. Another criteria was an author or book was one the bookseller recommended to their customers most often. That was one of the fun things for me in our bookstore...when a customer asked for a new author.  New to them, although the book might have been written years ago. Most mystery readers enjoy an author who had a series and naturally they wanted the first book in the series.

This was a fun project. We owe Jim Huang a big debt. For getting the IMBA members to compile this list and publishing it.

Okay, class, how many to you know and/or have read?

Stranded and Kwiked

I began thinking last month what I’d write about this month and my mind was totally blank until I received my first issue of the Strand Magazine. Imagine my delight when I saw John Floyd’s “Secrets,” a slow-paced story with a fast moving plot and rising tension in which two strangers, a man and woman, meet on a ferry boat in what appears a coincidence (it’s not but to say anymore would be a spoiler). The plot ends, but the tension doesn’t drop and the story doesn’t stop because the plight of the two characters continues, suggestively, in the reader’s imagination.

The other stories in the magazine are good, but the one that also interested me was Joseph Heller’s (1923-1999) unpublished "Almost Like Christmas,” written sometime between 1945-1969. Why would the editors publish a story about Christmas several months before Christmas. Because it is not about the holidays; it is a story that “ ...gives readers a provocative glimpse of seething race-related prejudice in an otherwise respectable small town,” (editor). In a town where black farmers from the south are allowed to buy land, a white teacher’s effort to integrate the schools results in three white boys badly beating a black boy. One of the white kids is stabbed, and the black kid is blamed. As an angry mob begins to form with the intention of hunting down the black kid, the atmosphere becomes “Almost Like Christmas.” In view of some of the violent incidents involving race these days, the story is very topical.

Reading Janice’s post on length prompted me to reread Poe’s essay “Philosophy of Composition” in which he states “It appears evident...that there is a distinct limit, as regards length, to all works of literary art — the limit of a single sitting....” but he admits this limit may be “overpassed” except in poetry. Her post also sent me to Amazon to buy Kwik Krimes. Editor Otto Penzler “thought it would be fascinating to see what authors could conjure if given the specific assignment of producing a mystery, crime, or suspense story of no more than one thousand words.”

I didn’t read all 81 stories before having to post this article. All, except one, of the 34 stories that I managed to read are well crafted and seem to comply with the word limit, plus or minus a word or two. I say seem because I didn’t count the words of each story, but based on page length, each is four pages long, plus or minus one or two pages. The disappointing story was the page and half “Acknowledgement.” It has no conflict though it suggests what happened to the narrator. It is like the acknowledgements in books thanking mama, daddy, uncle, aunt, agent, and anybody else who may have helped or hurt the author. To say what the ending suggests would be a spoiler. Since there is no mystery, suspense, or crime, it isn’t a story and seems out of place in this collection.

I give a big shoutout to Janice’s masterful story “The Imperfect Detective” in which the detective comes up with the perfect solution. It is so well crafted that any discussion of the plot would be a spoiler. 

If you haven’t already, add Kwik Krimes to your to-read list. Not only can you read one story in a single sitting, you can read three or four or, if you’re a speed writer, even more. 

One problem I have with reading flash fiction, short stories, and short short stories is the difficulty of avoiding spoilers in discussing them. If anyone has a solution to this problem, help.

But maybe I don’t need help because, according to an essay I read by Jonah Lehrer in the Internet magazine Wired two minutes before posting my article, “Spoilers Don’t Spoil Anything.” The article is certainly food for thought and a post on SleuthSayers if I can get around to thinking about what spoilers really do.