A glance at the cover of James R. Knight’s history of the Battle of Franklin, was enough to make me aware of what I would find inside. Having grown up in the South where I was immersed in the culture and history of the region, I have always enjoyed books about the Civil War written by knowledgeable writers. Knight’s careful research of the events surrounding one of the most decisive battles of the war did not disappoint. He has a captivating writing style that makes you feel that you have been thrust to the events. You can, in fact, almost smell the dust, the periods of despair, and the push toward victory that drove these determined men onward. Most writers who explain historical events, strive to answer the question of why this particular set of circumstances occurred. Knight draws us a little closer to the truth in his careful attention to detail. This book, which is part of History Press’s Sesquicentennial Series, is available at Amazon.

Book Trailer

The making of a book trailer. It’s not as easy as you think -- or is it?

I turned off a busy street into the narrow entrance of a shopping center, then came to an abrupt halt, staring at the grill of an SUV. The parking spaces running at the wrong angle should have given the driver a hint, as should the arrow pointing into the wrong direction. I couldn’t back into the busy street, and after a lot of finger and hand motions from the driver, he reluctantly backed away and I came up the ramp and did a hard right to avoid a collision with his bumper. As I squeezed past, he leaned out his window and shouted, “What’s in your head, dude?” Had he paused for a moment, I would have told him. My head at the moment was filled with a song from a 1987 album by an Australian singing group called Midnight Oil. The video is on YouTube and is called, Beds are Burning. The album has been a favorite of mine for many years. For anyone thinking of creating a book trailer, there are some almost indescribable elements in this four minute offering that make it worth studying. The performance is a miniature movie with all of the plot and visual elements required to get the message across. Should you record something similar to promote your book? Probably not, but you can definitely get some ideas from the music, the musicians, and the message. It is a protest song about the mistreatment of the Australian aborigines and the need to address the problem. It almost makes me want to return to
the ‘60s and wave a sign or two.

YouTube

Disaster, Anyone?

When the Soviet Union fell, there were many suspense and thriller writers who were crestfallen because they believed they would have nothing to write about. The Soviets were the perfect villains for the writers of fiction. They were powerful and seemed recklessly determined to dominate the world. The way their government officials dressed, and their military uniforms, had the visual effects needed to set the stage for almost anything. The aura of mystery that we called the Iron Curtain helped tremendously. While the Soviet Union might be on the garbage heap of history, the political entities that evolved have a greater potential for the imaginative writer.

Need another type of danger or disaster? What about the oil crisis. The possibility of energy shortages and the catastrophes they are sure to bring about, are almost too frightening to contemplate. What about medical or industrial accidents? What about the clever terrorist who gains control of the Internet and is able to penetrate the safeguards that protect the military, nuclear power facilities and our infrastructure? All we have to do is pick our disaster and scoot our chair up closer to the keyboard. The Internet has all of the technical details needed to flesh out the type of stories you have been itching to write. You don’t have to be Ian Fleming, Tom Clancy or Dan Brown in order to write them. As one small boy said in one of my horror stories, “The goblins are out there, Frankie. I think I hear them at the door.”

Chopping Your Manuscript Down to Size

In a recent email, a young writer asked if anyone had ever created a literary mess, plot wise, that could not be straightened out. “I have written almost two hundred thousand words,” she wailed. “Where do I go from here?”

I think a lot of us have known that feeling. We became too involved in our story, and like a dog with a broken leash, we can’t find a place to stop. How do we bring order into this unwieldy universe we have created? It can be done and it doesn’t have to be painful.

There is a method that works for me, and you might find it useful enough that your family will rethink their intention of shipping you off to the loony bin. You probably love what you have written, but it is time to ask yourself this simple question:

What is this scene supposed to accomplish?

Think of your plot as a whole. Try to determine if each scene pushes the story forward to a suitable climax, or if you have simply created a lot of sub-plot that has no connection to your main theme. Easier said than done, you are probably thinking. It will take something more powerful than one of Harry Potter’s magic spells to get the job done. Here is a thought that is almost as powerful as one of Harry’s incantations:

You are not writing for yourself - you are writing for the reader’s benefit!

In a rather caustic review on one website, the reviewer said, “This author is obviously rehashing her failed relationship with her lover, rather than telling us something about the romance of her two characters. I suggest that she take a pill and call us in the morning.”

Instead of fretting, do this. Create a sentence - not a paragraph - that tells you what each scene does. It might be something as simple as: “Molly discovers that Brett is attracted to her best friend.” Ask yourself if the reader needs to know all of the agonizing details, or can this entire scene be summed up in a sentence or two and accomplish the same thing. A lot of good writing has been ruined by cutting description, emotion, and action at the expense of everything else. The next time you discover that you have created a literary mountain instead of a molehill, concentrate on finding those scenes that have nothing to do with the rest of the story. Squash them like roach bugs, one by one, until you have everything down to a manageable size.

There, now! That didn’t hurt a bit, now did it?

Ebook anyone?

A surprising number of readers have never tried an Ebook. Even if you don’t have a Kindle reader, you can enjoy the growing number of books available in this new medium. During the week of March 7th through the 13th you can obtain two of my Ebooks from Smashwords at half price. Innocent is a full length suspense novel, and Stories for a Quiet Evening is a collection of short stories. Innocent is available for 99 cents and Innocent for $2.50. You can purchase both of them by following these links.

Innocent

Stories For a Quiet Evening

What Makes Fiction Seem Real

The human brain is somewhat like a garbage dump. Not a very flattering analogy, perhaps, but I like that description because it accurately reflects our experiences and our perception of the world. Whenever siblings gather during the holiday seasons and discuss their childhood experiences, the stories often diverge in ways that defy logic. “Oh, yes you did,” and “Oh, no I did not!” becomes part of the discussion, with each party convinced that their memories are correct.

If we have trouble remembering events that happened in our mutual lives, then it shouldn’t surprise us when we have problems with ‘facts’ that we did not directly experience. Most fiction is composed of things that happened— or should have happened, or perhaps might have happened— or at least we hope the reader will think so. There is a writer’s term that covers this situation. We call it suspending disbelief. You might think that stories that are similar to current events are easier to make believable, but this is not necessarily correct. I think there are three elements that make a story resonate with the reader and make them come back for more.

First: Do I believe in what I am writing? In one writer’s group where I am a member, someone asked a rather complicated question about obtaining DNA from a werewolf that had drowned and remained immersed in water for several days. Initially, I was startled by the question and wondered if the author did not know that werewolves were fictional creatures. But as I thought about the question, I realized that this author was doing something that all of us should strive harder to accomplish. In the world she had created, werewolves were real and she believed it with the necessary conviction to bring her plot to life on the written page.

Second: Do I understand the facts I have woven so carefully into my plot? I still cringe over a major mistake I once made in a story. I had carefully researched my plot and was convinced that all of my research was accurate. I checked three different sources for the details on this particular situation and they were all in agreement. The story was already in print before I realized I had missed this particular ‘fact’ by a country mile. Writers are notoriously bad at harvesting details from other books on a similar subject. How many times have you read about the smell of cordite lingering in the air after a shootout, even though cordite hasn’t been used in small arms ammunition for many years? There is nothing like talking to someone who has been there and done that.

Third: Do the ‘facts’ in my story run contrary to popular belief? There are a surprising number of things in this world that everyone believes to be true when they simply aren’t accurate. Some of the popular crime shows on television are notoriously inaccurate in pushing the envelope concerning technology. DNA evidence gets compared almost overnight, when in the real world, the backlog in crime labs make anything faster than two weeks very unlikely. On a recent crime show, a male agent turned to his companion and said, “I am an FBI agent. I get shot at every day!” In the literary world, writers attempt to whip every situation into a major event and people have come to accept these over-hyped situations as reality. I know a police officer who retired after thirty years on a large police force. He told me that he had never fired his gun while on duty, a fact of which he was rather proud. Try dropping that little gem into a story and see how much fan mail it will generate. Life is interesting and we must strike a balance between reality and what people believe about the world. It is an interesting situation, but that is what makes the world of fiction so interesting whether we are reading or writing the next bestseller.

Julia Dales Revisited

I was a little surprised when I wrote an article about a seventeen-year-old student from Canada named Julia Dales who wanted to win the beatboxing championship. I loved the video on YouTube because it was offbeat and was one of the amusing things teens have been doing since the first family left the garden of Eden. I have been amazed that the short article, published on May 30th of 2009, is still generating so many emails. There seems to be little middle ground. People are either amused by the video, or they tell me . . . “Our teens are irresponsible enough without you encouraging this kind of behavior” or “You usually write about serious things. I can’t believe that you are laughing over something so ridiculous.”

There are two reasons I liked the video. When my daughter was in high school, her best friend spent a lot of time at our house. Beatboxing had not been invented then, but if it had, Kim would have done it in some pricy restaurant (she has done worse) between the time the appetizers were served and the main course, and the other customers would have loved it.

The second reason has to do with who we are and how we look at life. One of my favorite passages of scripture is Ecclesiastes 3: 1-8. It is the one you have heard read aloud at countless funeral services. The forth verse says, ‘there is a time to cry and a time to laugh . . .’ I don’t believe the world has seen enough laughter, especially the kind that rises spontaneously from deep inside, with no purpose except to celebrate life. I think we should address the serious problems of the world, and God knows there are plenty of them. We are now fighting two wars with another looming on the horizon. We still haven’t solved all of the problems with Katrina. Now there is Haiti, the drug problem, crime, illness – just to name a few. All of them are worthy causes, but sadly, it is like playing whack-a-mole, you don’t get one solved until another crops up. There aren’t enough comedians like Bill Murray who appeared in the movie ‘Groundhog Day,’ nor well we ever get enough of those two zany characters in ‘Dumb and Dumber.’ We can’t turn our attention away from them because we see a little of ourselves in each act of insanity. Sadly, too many comedians dredge the bottom of obscenity to get laughs today.

Why do people object to the ridiculous things in society? I have a theory on this: We all have things we think we have hidden from the world, and too much attention on laughter might bring them to everyone’s attention.

I don’t think there are enough people like Julia Dales appears to be on her videos. Anyone with a whole orchestra in her head is to be admired and praised. Maybe she will grow up to be a musician or a surgeon who can carry her sunny outlook into the operating theatre, or perhaps she will aspire to the highest calling in the western world. Maybe she will strive to be a Mom and raise four or five little kids, each of them prepared to roll on the bed and laugh with unrestrained joy at the funny things of the world.

Here is a link to Julia Dales latest video: Julia Dales on YouTube.

Sniper Locater

If you write spy fiction, your hero won’t be complete without the latest gadgets to battle his country’s enemies. There are a lot of things out there that most of us never heard of, and a surprising amount of it is on the market. One of the newest offerings is a small device developed for military applications. This electronic sniper locater is called Ears Gunshot Localization System and is now available to the U.S. Army. This lightweight device is no bigger than a deck of cards, weighs 6.4 ounces, and can pinpoint the source of a gunshot in a fraction of a second. The technology works by triangulating the direction of the gunshot by analyzing the shape of the sound wave. The price is rather steep at $8,000, but the agency your secret agent works for has unlimited amounts of money, so what the heck.

Available at http://www.qinetiq-na.com/products-ears.htm

Location, location, location.

Fine tuning your fiction.

An friend of mine who runs a small and successful business has told me there are three secrets of success. You must have the right location before you can succeed. I did not stop to think of the ways location could play an important part in literature until I entered a short story contest. The contest promised a short critique on each story, which seemed to be more than worth the effort. I was pleasantly surprised at the depth of the editor’s evaluation of my short piece of flash fiction, but was puzzled over one comment at the end of the paragraph. He said, “Wouldn’t this story have been better if you had set it in Seattle?”

I read and reread the story and still couldn’t get the point. Like all flash fiction, the story was rather lean, the scene happening on a street corner that could have been anywhere, USA. I have never been to Seattle. The longer I thought about the editor’s suggestion, the more I realized that even in short fiction, location can be extremely important. Here is a place where we can bring vibrant reality to a scene—even a short one—with a sentence or less. Take the following situations:

[A man senses danger as he pulls to the side of the road to examine a flat tire.] He closed the car door with a soft click that was barely audible above the faint sighing of the wind from the bayou.

Or: The thin sliver of the moon slid behind the clouds, but in the brief instant, he could see the barren landscape stretching toward the horizon.

We experience the world through our five senses. It is astonishing how seldom we employ smells, texture, and taste to our stories. You can, in fact, read through an entire book and find little except what the characters see and hear. The rich odor of food in a Chinatown restaurant, the taste of fresh artic snow on our lips, or the texture of an expensive fabric can awaken emotions and set a scene more than an entire chapter of dry dialogue or dull narrative.

Short Story, Anyone?

Tags: John Grisham, Ford County, short stories.

There are many websites on the Internet where you can read short stories for free, and a lot of us take advantage of the opportunity. Some of these sites have a comment section where the readers can give their opinion. For any given story, the comments will run from snarky to the sublime—some of the comments are actually better than the stories. The comments that heap ridicule on the author’s head aren’t necessarily bad, because all of them reflect the opinion of the individual readers. One often stated opinion is the ending of the stories. One recent comment was, “. . . too long a buildup for a one-liner ending.” Another writer said, “Your last sentence would have been appropriate for a joke, but not for a serious story.”

I have started reading John Grisham’s collection of short stories called Ford County. From the very first story, it became obvious to me that Mr. Grisham did not make this mistake, and it should cause some of us to rethink the way we have been taught to end a short story. Most essays end with some sentence that is like double punctuation, intended to nail down and give meaning to everything that went before. When Grisham gets to the end he just stops. He has already said everything on the subject clearly and concisely and there is no need to put a backstop to the story. If you are tired of reading stories about Presidents, earth shattering events, and a world gone wild, you might like the change of pace Ford County offers. The stories are earthy, and they make us remember that over thirty million people in this country live a hardscrabble existence. Grisham shows us a better way to end a good story without too much burble or slush.

Logic 101

All writing, on some level or another, must make sense. Even if we are writing science fiction or fantasy, we must maintain a level of logic that doesn’t jar the mind too much, or the reader is likely to reject what we say. That is not to say that everything has to be proven in a scientific laboratory, but it must hold to the ‘rules’ that apply to the world we have created. One of my early encounters with reality was an exercise I wrote in a short story course which was supposed to show a simple incident where two people were doing something—it didn’t matter what—that gave the reader a glimpse of who they were, what they were doing, and where the story might go from there. I was going to play it safe and write something very simple. My writing coach gave me a ‘C-’ and said he did not believe it. The scene involved two men sitting at a small table in the outdoor section of a restaurant, drinking coffee. They sipped, enjoyed the fresh spring air, and heard the muted sounds of early morning traffic. How could you not believe that this could happen? Believability involves at least two things. It must flow from the characters in a way that is logical, and it must be what we (the reader) would expect them to do. This is not to say that we can’t have strange twist, but the reader needs to have an Aha! moment where he/she thinks, I should have seen that coming. Mark Twain made an interesting observation when he said, “It’s not what you don’t know that can come back to haunt your, it’s what you know for sure that ain’t true.”

What are they thinking?

WHAT ARE THEY THINKING?

Obscenity, vulgarity, and bad taste — do we really need it in our literature?

There is an astonishing amount of good literature available on the Internet, and a lot of it is free. I like to browse websites and blogs for some of the best of it. Recently, I found a well written story. The suspense and plotting was just about perfect, and I was anticipating a great ending—which came in the last line. I was not pleased, however, with some of the language in the story. Many of the sentences were augmented with four letter words, such as in ‘what the ****.’ I could have lived with one or two, but this occurred in almost every short paragraph. When I suggested that this did not add to the story, most of the other readers disagreed. Words like honest, descriptive, and true to life, popped up in their responses. My question to you is this: Are our readers intelligent enough they can get by without giving them a detailed description of all of our character’s body functions? If you are expecting a moral lesson in any of this, you are going to be disappointed. Morals, or the lack of them, is not the issue I am addressing here. It is simply a matter of looking at ‘honesty’ in a different way. Many blacksmiths, sailors, and construction workers have an ‘honest’ way of expressing themselves, and the rest of us know to move back a few feet when they become unspooled. From having read tens of thousands of books and stories, I have come to believe that the very mention of some human condition can convey all of the emotional flags we need to raise in a particular dramatic situation. As any editor can tell you, the correct word is what triggers human emotion or perception. The sprinkling of four letter words is the literary equivalent of using triple explanation marks at the end of a sentence — and you don’t want me to do that!!! Now do you!!!