Grand Theft Litto

by John M. Floyd

One of the things beginning writers seem to worry a lot about is that their stories might be stolen by the editors who receive and read their submissions. Because of that, we usually spend some time in each of my writing courses talking about it, along with the inevitable discussions of copyright, lawsuits, etc. The truth is, it's rarely a problem. I tell my students that editors of respectable publications aren't going to steal your work; worry instead about getting them to buy your work. (Editors of fly-by-night publications probably won't steal it either, but you shouldn't be sending stories to them anyhow.)

The folks who do the stealing are other writers. Even this, though, isn't a cause for concern. Most writers don't steal stories--they steal ideas, and they steal those from stories that have already been published.

Hands up, and back away from the register . . .

It's a fact: all authors, eventually and to some degree, steal ideas from other authors' work. I'm not referring to plagiarism here, or anything overly obvious. I'm talking about reading something by another writer and thinking Whoa, that's a great clue, or an interesting style, or a clever twist--and finding a way to include a version of that in what you're planning for your next story or novel. (It's one of the many reasons that good writers are avid readers as well.) The source of this ripe-for-the-picking idea might bear little resemblance to the final result, but that's okay too. The important thing is, it served as a catalyst. As an inspiration.

In movies, plot theft is done all the time, either subtlely or blatantly, and if you watch enough of them you can pick it out. I knew immediately that Pale Rider was a thinly disguised rehash of Shane, and everyone knows that The Magnificent Seven came from The Seven Samurai. The list goes on and on: The Shop Around the Corner/You've Got Mail, Battle Royale/The Hunger Games, Big/13 Going on 30, Yojimbo/A Fistful of Dollars/Last Man Standing, The Innocents/The Others, Turner & Hooch/K-9, Dances With Wolves/The Last Samurai/Avatar, Here comes Mr. Jordan/Heaven Can Wait, etc. Some of these were authorized remakes and others were just similar. Either way, the plots were recycled, and in a few cases produced as good a result, or better, the second or third time around.

Examples closer to home

In one of my stories, "The Powder Room" (the title refers to an explosives bunker, not a ladies' comfort station), I took an idea that I'd seen in a Jack Ritchie short story years ago and turned it around a bit to suit my purposes. In the Ritchie story a good guy who was about to be murdered secretly placed a wine glass bearing the bad guy's fingerprints into a safe as a way to make sure the holder of the glass didn't go through with the hit. Sort of a reverse blackmail. In my story I had the hero snap a photo of the villain and then put the camera into a vault with a time-lock. I also added a lot more twists to the story, but the threat of the "insurance" in the safe was an important plot point. The resulting story was accepted by AHMM and was later listed in Best American Mystery Stories as one of the "Distinguished Stories of 2009."

In another tale, I used an escape method that I'd once read about in the William Mulvihill novel The Sands of Kalahari. In that book, a murderer had been captured by a band of good guys in the middle of nowhere, and--being good guys--they decided to imprison him rather than kill him. Their makeshift jail was a deep stone pit with smooth, unclimbable sides. The problem was, it rained all that night, and the next morning they discovered that the runoff from the mountains had filled the pit with muddy water. Too bad, they thought--he's drowned. But he hadn't. They later found the pit empty. The captive had simply treaded water until the level rose high enough for him to climb out. One of my characters did the same kind of thing in my story "The Messenger," which first appeared in the magazine Futures, was nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and was reprinted four times in other publications.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I should reiterate that both those stories were bridesmaids instead of brides. The first one was only listed in the Best Mysteries anthology; it wasn't one of the featured stories. And the second one was nominated; it didn't win. Oh well . . .)

Picky, picky

A basic part of this "acceptable" literary theft is that you don't steal the whole story--that would be at worst illegal and unethical and at best unoriginal (as well as stupid). What you do is, you pick out a small part that fascinates you and then weave that idea into an idea of your own. I recently read a Carl Hiaasen novel in which a voodoo queen put a curse on someone but accidentally evil-eyed the wrong person. It was only a tiny part of a subplot, but it got me to thinking. I wound up moving the setting from the Florida Keys to New Orleans, and changed a bunch of things about the hexer and the hexed and the motive and the process, and added some reversals here and there, and came up with what I think is a neat little mystery story. Whether it gets published is another matter, but I did the best I could.

This kind of copying/imitation/larceny can also be less specific. Maybe your inspiration is James Lee Burke's beautifully descriptive settings, or Janet Evanovich's constant use of action verbs, or Robert Parker's nonstop dialogue, or Lee Child's "slowing down" of action scenes to tell the reader exactly what the hero is thinking during the fights, or Harlan Coben's double and triple plot twists, or Kathryn Stockett's use of dialect without phonetic (mis)spellings, or Stephen King's fondness for using brand names for products and using children as protagonists. These ultra-talented authors, by the way, are particularly good candidates to steal from. Pickpockets don't go to the poor side of town; they hang around the country club and the opera house and the financial district.

Masters of fine arts

In closing, I should mention that the premise of Ronald Tobias's outstanding book 20 Master Plots is that every plot in existence is just a variation of one of those twenty. What you write is almost always a different take on an already-used idea. You're just writing it in your own words.

What are your views on all this? Do you find yourself getting story ideas from what you read, or see in movies? Have you ever taken someone else's plot structures, description methods, themes, quirky POVs, dialogue techniques, etc., and remodeled them to come up with your own versions? How far do you go with something like that? How far is too far?

I once heard that it's okay to steal others' ideas as long as you don't steal others' expressions of those ideas. I like that. Another observation that I recall, from someplace: Stealing ideas is an art, and stealing them well is a fine art.

I think it was T. S. Eliot who said, "Mediocre writers borrow. Great writers steal."

Go thou and do likewise.

Days of Treachery

In The Art of Warfare, Sun Tzu says: "All warfare is based on deception."

Tomorrow marks seventy-two years since the Japanese military forces pulled a sneak attack on America's navy at Pearl Harbor. At the time, the U.S. government didn't expect much to happen because the Japanese diplomats were still negotiating in Washington, D.C. to avoid war. We all know how well that turned out. Even though the Japanese had several previous incidents of engaging in military action in other countries without first declaring hostilities, the U.S. did not prepare itself against this same type of incident. Afterwards, president Franklin D. Roosevelt called it "a day to live in infamy." You'd think we'd not only remember that day, but would also learn a lesson from it.

Sun Tzu says: "Attack him when he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected."

Turn the clock forward in time twenty-seven years plus a couple of months from Pearl Harbor. At this point, the U.S. had already been at war in Viet Nam for three years. Our commanders and experts should be prepared for anything, but this is a guerilla war and we have a conventional army. We haven't used guerilla tactics since the American Revolution. Other than several Special Forces teams out in the bush, most commanders are still using strategies left over from Korea and WWII.

Happy New Year to you!!!


For centuries, the calendar used in Viet Nam has been the same as the Chinese one, a lunisolar based calendar. Their new year, called Tet Nguyen Dan, generally falls during late January or early February in our western calendar. Tet is the most important celebration of the year for the Vietnamese. Special foods are cooked and the house is cleaned in preparation for this three-day holiday. On the first day, lucky money in red envelopes is given to children and elders, ancestors are worshiped and there is much wishing of new Year's greetings to friends and family. It is a believed custom that the first person to set foot in the house on that morning determines good luck or bad for that house during the rest of the year. To that end, most families took care to invite whoever was to be the first person stepping into their house on that first day. Sometimes, to avoid any bad luck, the owner himself would leave the house just before midnight and return a few minutes after both clock hands had touched twelve.

It had also been a long standing custom in Viet Nam for both warring sides to call a truce during this holiday period. All of the Vietnamese, soldiers and civilians alike, if they could, went back to their family home to celebrate. The American troops weren't able to return to their homes in the U.S., but since the South Vietnamese and the North Vietnamese had both agreed to the upcoming cease fire, then the Americans could relax for a few days. After all, nothing had happened in-country during the last few Tet holiday truces. Wrong choice again.

Marines retaking the old capital city of Hue

The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese had long planned a guerrilla uprising in the south for the first morning of Tet. What better way to show the South Vietnamese their future than to have a Communist guerrilla fighter be the first one to step into their house on this special holiday. In the early morning of January 30, 1968, the Viet Cong and troops from the north attacked about one hundred major towns and cities, to include Saigon and the U.S. Embassy. To us, it was treachery in breaking the cease fire they had agreed to, but to them it was just good strategy set forth by an ancient Chinese warrior/philosopher.

American troops quickly rallied and defeated the guerrillas. Some places took a day, some took a month to bring back under control. The Communists lost an estimated 45,000 combatants killed in action. The Americans won the battles, but soon lost the war due to pressure from back on the home front.

So, could the Americans have  been better prepared?

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." ~ George Santayana

In 1941, the Japanese already had a record of attacking countries without warning. The American intelligence agencies got caught sleeping on the job, or else they ignored the danger signs. They paid no attention to history. Thus the Pearl Harbor attack found us with no good defense in place.

Then, in early 1968, our military and intelligence agencies got caught short again. They failed to remember the lesson from Pearl Harbor. Perhaps if they'd delved into the history of Viet Nam, they'd have found the example left by the Trung Sisters and taken heed.

Trung Sisters on war elephants

For centuries, Viet Nam (or parts of it) had fought for independence against various invaders: the Chinese (at least three times), the French (twice), the Japanese (during WWII), and the Americans and their allies, not to mention several ancient civilizations and kingdoms long gone to dust. During the first Chinese occupations centuries past, the Trung Sisters grew tired of their oppressors, raised an army of Vietnamese patriots and threw the Chinese out for a few years. What was the date of their uprising? Strangely enough, it was February 6th, right about Tet Nguyen Dan for that year.

There have long been shrines to the Trung Sisters and their rebellion, especially in the north and around Hanoi. It's not like their existence was a secret or something forgotten over the centuries. Evidently, we didn't pay attention to the history of the country we were in.

What next?

History is still out there teaching lessons, both to those who care to learn and with hard lessons to those who don't pay attention to her. Which leaves us with the question; do we have more surprises coming in the future, or are we paying attention yet?

The Great American Novel - Yeah, Right

by Eve Fisher

First of all, thank you, Fran, for a great idea for a column!  Fran wrote on Monday a blog called "What's Lit Got To Do With It" -  http://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/12/whats-lit-got-to-do-with-it.html - in which she unveiled her new Callie Parrish novel, which is great, and I can hardly wait to read it.  But something she said - "it's not the Great American Novel..." - triggered a whole range of responses in me, beginning with,

WHY do we always say that?  (Except of course, for those who think they have written the GAN, and all I can say is, God bless you and just keep moving on.  Nothing to see here.  Nothing to do with you.)  Really, I have heard this rap - "well, thanks, but it's not the Great American Novel" - from all sorts of mystery writers, fantasy writers, romance writers, sci-fi writers...  And here's my response:

(1) Most "literary" novels, most "great" novels, are depressing.  I know this because I have read a lot of them.  They are mostly about how crappy life is, how disillusioning, how people make bad choices, and very few of them have happy endings.
SIDE NOTE #1:  I believe the only humorous novel that the critics agree is a Great American Novel is Huckleberry Finn - surely there are more than that.  And the last comedy to win Best Picture was "Annie Hall" in the 1970s...  Tells you something right there, doesn't it?  And a lot of people today are embarrassed about "Our Town" winning a Pulitzer Prize "because it's so sappy" - no, it isn't.
SIDE NOTE #2:  Interestingly, the Russians - who always get a bad rap for depression - are much more hopeful than the British and the Americans, but I think that's mostly because Dostoevsky and Tolstoy both had strong spiritual beliefs, and so believed that there was a way out of hell.  (And if you want ribald humor with that, try Gabriel Garcia-Marquez or Gunter Grass.)  But there's a whole lot of authors who simply provide hell, and no way out, and I'm not just talking about Kafka.  Back in Victorian times, after reading Jude the Obscure, Edmund Gosse wondered, "What has Providence done to Mr. [Thomas] Hardy that he should rise up in the arable land of Wessex and shake his fist at his Creator?"  I tend to ask the same about Cormac McCarthy.  Enough is enough.
SIDE NOTE #3:  I don't have to have a happy ending - I still re-read Edith Wharton and "Madame Bovary," and I loved "Mystic River" - but if your characters are universally unpleasant, violent, inarticulate, and hostile, moving across a bleak landscape in which there is no hope and it's all a mug's game, and everyone ends up miserable, raped, tortured, and/or dead...  I may give it a pass.  Forever.

The one and only
James Thurber

(2) What are the novels you read and re-read?  The ones where the spine's broken, and the pages are falling out, and you finally have to buy a new copy because you've read them to death?  My bet is a lot of them are funny.  A lot of them are fun.  A lot of them make you feel good.
SIDE NOTE:  Please feel free to provide your own definition of fun and what makes you feel good:  for some it's Stephen King (personally I read too much Poe and Lovecraft as a child, and I don't like being scared that much anymore).  Other's it's P. G. Wodehouse.  I go all over the place, myself, from the complete works of Patrick O'Brian (who has a wicked sense of humor) to James Thurber to Gunter Grass (everyone talks about "The Tin Drum", and all I can say is, read "The Flounder") to Angela Thirkell.

(3) There are not enough humorous works in the world.  Seriously.  We need more laughter, folks.  We need more jocularity, as Father Mulcahy would say.  And those who write funny, humorous, amusing, entertaining, witty, acerbic, knee-slapping, whimsical, ribald, facetious, farcical, waggish, playful, droll, campy, merry, and/or playful stories, sketches, plays, novels, essays, poems, etc. should never, ever, ever be ashamed of it, or put themselves down for it, or say, "Well, it's not the Great American Novel..."  I repeat, THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH HUMOROUS BOOKS OUT THERE.  Write some more.  People will thank you, read you, love you.  Repeatedly.  I know I will.

(4) People have been giving the lighter stuff a bad rap for millenia.  Petrarch told Boccaccio that his "Decameron Tales" (the world's largest collection of dirty jokes, told against the background of the bubonic plague, and if the world ever needed a laugh, it was then) were unworthy of a humanist and a scholar.  The result:  Boccaccio quit writing.  Religious pressure made Chaucer add a retraction to his "Canterbury Tales", taking it all back.  Samuel Johnson said that "Tristram Shandy will not last."  All I can say is, "Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah."

To these and every writer who has tickled, amused, and made me burst out laughing, thank you!
Keep it up!

Loose Genes

This is not going to be as cohesive as (I hope) most of my pieces here are, because I have three vaguely related things I want to talk about.  And they have only a slight connection to crime or mystery.  The fact that I'm fighting a cold doesn't help.

So if you prefer to skip this and go check your email you won't hurt my feelings. If you're still with me, here goes.

A relative recently told us she had her genome tested and invited us to do the same.  This feat, which would have been the wildest science fiction a few decades ago, now costs about a hundred bucks and takes a couple of weeks.  You spit in a test tube, and wait to get an email.  Not exactly Doctor Who, is it?

And the results, I have to say, are pretty cool.  My background, as far as I know, is one-half Italian, three-eighth English, and one-eighth Irish.  The computers spotted 10% Italian, 3% British/Irish, 2% French/German, and the rest is mostly vaguely European.  There is a tantalizing 0.2% Sub-Saharan African, which I assume comes from my Italian ancestors.  (To paraphrase Pete Seeger, where do you think those Roman emperors got their curly hair?)  Oh, and I am 2.8% Neanderthal.

But more interesting, the same service tells you if you have inherited health risks that are greater or lower than average.  And that is why the Food and Drug Administration just sent them an order to cease their business.  Because, says the FDA, they were giving out medical advice, which is illegal.  I look forward to seeing how it turns out in court, but I will say this: I have a higher-than-average level of one chemical and my doctor has been trying for years to figure out why.  The computer gurus (knowing nothing about my medical test results) were able to tell me that that higher level runs in my genome.

If you want to know more about the controversy, read this and this.

Now, on to the second topic.  I am reading a fascinating and infuriating non-fiction book by Rebecca Skloot entitled THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS.     Ms.  Lacks suffered from bad luck nine ways from Sunday.  She was an African-American woman born in poverty in the rural south in the early-twentieth century.  (I am not saying it is bad luck to be born African-American.  But there have been better times and places for it.)  She died of cervical cancer in 1951 at age 31.

But before she died scientists took samples of her tumor, possibly with her permission (the phrase "informed consent" hadn't even entered the medical vocabulary by that point).  Scientists had been trying for years to grow cells in test tubes, but the cells always died after a few generations.  Not so the HeLa cells (named for their original source).  They were "immortal," and could be cultured, multiplied, sent through the mail, experimented on, etc.

And so cells that began in this poor, hard-luck woman, were used to develop polio vaccines, were sent into space, and became essential parts of thousands of other studies.  (The name of that genome company I was talking about is 23andme, which refers to the 23 chromosomes in the human genome. Guess whose cells were used in figuring out that number?)  Ms. Lacks' cells were so potent that years later many other colonies of cells that were growing around the world were discovered to be contaminated with HeLa cells - even though none had been used in that laboratory. They could sneak in on a dirty test tube, or a scientist's coat.

The book, which I highly recommend, also discusses the baffled horror of Ms. Lacks' family as they discovered, decades after the fact, what had been done to parts of her body without their knowledge or permission. The conflict between the scientists and the family takes on the inevitability of Greek tragedy: there was simply no common ground for communication.  You find yourself expecting the next unintentional outrage.  When it becomes necessary to explain the concept of "genetic markers" to Ms. Lacks's widower, a man with four years of schooling, of course the scientists had it done over the phone by a researcher with a thick Chinese accent and imperfect English.  How could it have been otherwise?

Reasonable people can disagree about whether persons whose cells are used in research deserve any control or compensation. (There are more than 17,000 patents based on HeLa cells.)  But it boggles the mind that  some scientists in the early fifties thought it acceptable to secretly inject HeLa cells (highly  active cancer cells, remember) into surgery patients just to see what would happen. This went on until some physicians refused to participate, pointing out that eight doctors were hanged at Nuremberg for that sort of research.

And on that cheerful note, let's move on to my third topic.  I just finished reading NECESSARY
LIES, the most recent novel by my sister, Diane Chamberlain.  You can certainly accuse me of nepotism for bringing it up here, but I think you will see the connection.  Diane's excellent book is fiction, of course, but it is firmly rooted in the Eugenics Sterilization Program, under which North Carolina sterilized 7,000 people between 1929 and 1975.  They focused on "mentally defective" epilectics, and people on welfare.  Most states with such programs gave them up after World War II (the shadow of Nuremberg, again), but the Tarheel State actually boosted theirs.

Diane's novel is set in 1960 when a brand-new social worker (after three whole days of training!) is given the job of preparing the sterilization request for a pregnant fifteen-year-old.  The idea is that the girl will wake up after giving birth with an "appendectomy scar" and never be told  she has been sterilized.

The book is not a mystery.  It is not a melodrama either: there are no cackling villains.  Everyone thinks they are doing the right thing (just like the scientists who used the HeLa cells).  And Diane is careful to include one woman who is thrilled to get the operation, since birth control was not easily available.

There are crimes and punishments in the book, but whether the crimes are what gets punished is open to interpretation.

Well, I'm going back to my sickbed.  I hope I gave you a few things to think about, anyway.

Our On-Line Age

St. Louis Central Public Library

       In a week when a lot of us of a certain age were reflecting back to events of 50 years ago I found myself off on a related tangent, thinking about how different the task of researching is now from what it entailed back when I was an early teenager in 1963. Some of this was sparked by a comment from Fran to my last SleuthSayers post recalling what it was like to visit a library back then. All of this rang true for me. I remember the process of researching term papers back in the 1960s -- taking the long bus ride to the downtown St. Louis Central Library, spending the morning poring over three by five cards in the card catalogs, filling out a request for various reference texts and then waiting while the librarian gathered the materials and wheeled them out of the stacks. The process was tedious, and if those books piled in front of me spawned their own questions, the follow up research meant starting the whole process over again. It was far easier to forego tracking down a question arising from the review of that first pile of books than it was to follow the thought thread through to fruition.

       The way most of us research and write now bears no relation to that process. A laptop and an internet connection is all that is needed to find just about every factoid imagineable. Personally, I am happy with all of this. But whether we are, in the long run, bettered or hindered by our easy electronic access to information today is a subject that is still open to some debate. It is, in any event, easy to come up with examples of how the ways in which we answer our own questions have changed in a computerized wifi world.

       Personal example one: Some years back two older friends of ours from New York City, Jim McPherson and his wife Phyllis King, were visiting us for the weekend. Jim and Phyllis (now deceased and sorely missed), both poets, were two of the most intelligent and well-read folks you would ever want to stumble across. (Jim was named poet laureate of West Virginia, one of only three in the State’s history, in 1942 at the tender age of 20.)  On this particular visit we were sitting in our living room reading when I came across the word “bookkeeper” and stopped cold, looking at it closely, perhaps for the first time. I turned to Jim and said “Can you name a word in the English language that has three consecutive double letters?” Jim thought a minute and said “bookkeeper.” I was floored -- “did you know that already?” I asked him. “No,” he replied. “It’s just the only example I could think of."  That, in a mind, is astonishing. But with the advent of the internet it is no longer a big deal to secure an answer to that question. Pose it on Yahoo and you instantly get “bookkeeper” and (icing on the cake) “sweettooth” for dessert.

The Little Lost Child (1894)

       Personal example two: When I was a child my maternal grandmother, while working around her house, would repeatedly sing two lines of a song from her childhood. She had long-since forgotten the rest of the song, but remembered that it was about a policeman who found a lost child and, through a convoluted series of verses, the child turned out to be his own. She sang those first two lines so much that the song, over the years, became somewhat of a joke in our family.  Eventually my mother and I tried to find the rest of the lyrics, searching out song encyclopedias at the library, all to no avail. Some years back I even tried a computer search using the first two lines, the only ones my grandmother remembered: "Once a police man, found a little child.” All you get from from an internet inquiry using those words are stories about abducted children. But last week, thinking about this column, I decided to try again. I added the word “lyric” at the beginning of the search. That was all that was needed: The song, lost to my family’s collective memory for probably more than a hundred years, is The Little Lost Child. My grandmother’s memory was wrong -- it actually began “A passing policeman . . . .” But once the inquiry is framed as a search for a lyric, even with that erroneous first word, the internet promptly spits back the complete lyrics to the song, a Wikipedia article about it and (this I could hardly believe) a You Tube rendition. And all of this (as you can confirm by listening in) for a song that is truly terrible and (ironically) would probably have been best left forgotten. But that’s not the point -- the point is that you can now almost instantly find almost anything -- even facts that are largely useless.

       When we have this much researching power at our fingertips you can expect some pretty profound changes to occur in the writing process.  Ready access to such a power allows some research to be performed that simply could not have been done in the past, or at least not without more time and effort than the task warranted. Those followup questions that I ignored late in the day in the St. Louis library back in 1963 are no problem now. 

       Some argue, however, that there may be a dark side to this as well. A notable study of teenagers in Korea, an on-line country where reportedly 65% of all teens have grown up using smartphones, has revealed the prevalence of a condition that the study coins "digital dementia," or deterioration of thinking and memory. A UPI news report concerning the study provides the following example:

Psychiatrist Kim Dae-jin at Seoul St. Mary's Hospital recently diagnosed a 15-year-old boy with symptoms of early onset dementia due to intense exposure to digital technology -- television, computer, smartphone and video games -- since age 5. He could not remember the six-digit keypad code to get into his own home and his memory problems were hurting his grades in school. "His brain's ability to transfer information to long-term memory has been impaired because of his heavy exposure to digital gadgets," the psychiatrist [reported].

       But is the negative connotation involved in calling these symptoms a form of “dementia” really correct here? We know, going all the way back to the writings of William James, that thinking involves the interaction of long term and short term memory.   It is theorized that short term memory cannot handle more than roughly 7 chunks of information (otherwise stored in long-term memory) at any one time, and that the process of thinking involves juggling concepts and facts back and forth between the two in those manageable chunks. Psychologists have also long recognized that we already “share” long-term memories with others and depend on others to fill in our own blanks -- I remember how to do some things, my wife remembers how to do others, and if I was trying to think of a word with three consecutive double letters, well, Jim McPherson would have been my go-to guy.  What we are now learning to do instead is to depend on the computer and the internet to perform this function of data retention and sharing that previously we commited to long term memory -- either or own or others'.  Now what becomes important is not the fact, but how to get to the fact on the computer, e.g. adding that word "lyric" when you are looking for a song.

       A Harvard study, as reported in an article in Science Express examining the effects of a world where information is readily available at the tap of a key, seems to confirm all of this:

The advent of the Internet, with sophisticated algorithmic search engines, has made accessing information as easy as lifting a finger. No longer do we have to make costly efforts to find the things we want. We can “Google” the old classmate, find articles online, or look up the actor who was on the tip of our tongue. The results of four studies [conducted by Harvard] suggest that when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.

       A recent Columbia University study reaches similar conclusions, arguing that we are now using the internet as personal external memory drives. Summarizing that study the Los Angeles Times had this to say:

We’ve come to use our laptops, tablets and smartphones as a 'form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside of ourselves . . . . We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools, growing into interconnected systems that remember less by knowing information than by knowing where information can be found.

St. Louis Library -- Atrium where those stacks used to be

       And this, in turn, sounds all in all like a good thing in many respects. Certainly readily accessible information is a boon to those of us who write, and certainly to all of us producing scheduled articles here at SleuthSayers. Reflecting on information and sharing those reflections are far easier tasks without those trips to the library research rooms of our youth. Stated another way, an article such as this one would not have been written if the only sources available were those in the stacks in the St. Louis Central Library back in 1963. Who had the time?

       We are not the only ones changing as the internet renders irrelevant many of the volumes that used to be housed in library stacks.  The St. Louis Central Library that I relied on for research 50 years ago has moved along with the rest of us.  The newly renovated building, scheduled to re-open to the public this month, replaces those stacks where I researched as a teenager with a multi-story sunlit atrium.  There is also a coffee shop where we can wile away some of that time we save.

What's Lit Got To Do With It?

Did you say,
"WHAT'S LIT GOT TO DO WITH IT?"


                                Not a damn thing!

 My sixth Callie Parrish mystery is out, and it's not the Great American Novel, not anywhere near literary.  It's another cozyesque, which is what I call the Callie books.

Here's a peek at what happens:

                 Callie and Jane love receiving presents, but 
                 the package under their Christmas tree isn't
                 from Santa.  It's the jolly old elf himself
                 though he's not jolly anymore.

                This investigation takes Callie away from her
                mortuary cosmetician duties to unusual places
                like Safe Sister and the first annual St. Mary
               Turkey Trot.  Sheriff Harmon even temporarily
               deputizes her before Santa's killer attacks both
               Callie and Jane.

A Corpse Under the Christmas Tree isn't great literature, but it was a great pleasure to write, and, according to the emails she receives, Callie's fans get lots of fun and mystery from her. (Yes, readers correspond with Callie, including holiday and birthday wishes.)

For a decent definition of the cozy genre, go to Wikipedia. I probably should have done that myself before thinking that's what I was creating.  Writing the first Callie mystery, I believed it was a cozy, but publishers marketed it and the following ones as Mainstream Mystery, and I created my own genre title--the cozyesque.  

Some cozies include recipes, stitchery patterns, and other useful instructions.  Perhaps additions like that would move me more into the cozy genre. I considered adding knitting or crochet patterns. After all, I learned to crochet and knit when I divorced.

I thought I'd need something to keep me busy every other weekend when the boys were at their dad's.  As though two kids, a house, full-time job, and sideline of writing songs and magazine features left a lot of time!

I learned to knit and crochet.  When the afghan for my king size bed was about twelve inches square, I decided I'd rather go dancing.

I'd still rather dance though I don't look quite like this doing it anymore. 

No knitting or crochet patterns for a Callie book.  I did, however, desire more "cozyesqueness" in the new book.

I  added recipes. 

No, they aren't scattered through the narrative. When other writers do that, it disrupts my reading.  Callie's brother Frankie has added some of Pa's Southern Recipes and Rizzie's Gullah Recipes at the end of the book.

I hope Callie's readers have as much pleasure reading the new Callie as I did writing it.  I  hope they try the recipes, some of which were previously on the website.

To read an article that made me very happy about the new book, go to http://www.free-times.com/pdf/112713/#p=36 .

This is the first novel I've written with an outline.  Next time, I'll share with you why and how.   
        
Until we meet again, take care of … you!

Professional Tips: Empty Words

by Leigh Lundin

As I grew more proficient at writing and heeded advice not to be overly wordy, especially with modifiers, I began to notice a few words that could be deleted, changing the sentence's meaning little or none at all. Pardon these exaggerated examples:

I certainly somewhat quite like M&Ms, mostly just the red ones.

Translation: I like red M&Ms.

She was very upset that her car somehow couldn't get any traction.

Translation: She was upset her car couldn't get traction.

Somehow they ambled about, very much as if cows, dumb as ever, could ever think.

Translation: The cows ambled dumbly, not as if they could think.

Empty Words

I began to think of these as 'empty words', hollow modifiers with little meaning. Granted, 'very' and 'really' act as intensives, but how useful are they? That question "How useful" is a key that can be applied to any modifier, but for 'empty words', the answer is often: "not at all."

If you say, "He buttered a certain slice of toast," does its particularity matter to the reader? If the answer's no, then the word does nothing but consume space and time– it only slows the story.

As I worked, I compiled a list of empty words and added to it adverbs of marginal utility.

Empty Words

about any certain certainly ever just

many mostly much quite rather really

so some somehow somewhat that very

The word 'that' is a special case. The word can be used as an adverb, a pronoun, a determiner, and a conjunction. We're primarily interested in the conjunction, but the adverb is worth a glance:

Adverb form: Jackson wasn't that drunk.

Conjunction: She said that she was sick.

Inspect the adverbial form of 'that' with an eye toward modifying. Use the conjunction only for clarity to set off confusing clauses, but otherwise avoid it. Deleting 'that' in the second sentence doesn't change the meaning at all.

Fat Words

Not long ago, I came across a list of 'fat words', sort of weasel words used as 'grey noise' in conversations, e.g: "Generally, I don't believe in politics and often I almost nearly always refuse to discuss it."

Many words in these lists can be used legitimately, but they often find themselves employed in writing or dialogue where they add dead weight to stories and drag them to a crawl. I added the word 'hopefully' to the existing list as another common 'filler'.

Be wary of other kinds of padding such as big in size or red in color. Santa is simply big and red.

Fat Words

almost especially frequently

generally mostly nearly

often usually hopefully

It's difficult to write this article without using the words I complain about! What are your most annoying empty words and fat phrases?

The ƒ Word

One obvious word doesn't appear on these lists. More often than not, swear words are part of conversational 'grey noise'. But they're sometimes used as intensives, and the way they're used can reveal character– or lack of character.

I've long wanted to use a conversation from long ago, but I haven't come across the right story for it. I won't confess which line I spoke in the conversation that went like this:

"I ƒ-ing missed you."
"And vice versa!"