How to rite Killer Fiction

by Carolyn Wheat

  Scene and style, then, are the basic ingredients of a well-written, entertaining novel. Mastering the basics of scene creation and working toward a writing style that expresses your personality are important aspects of becoming the writer you want to be.

  How you go about putting words on the page depends upon the kind of writer (perhaps even the kind of person) you already are.

  THERE ARE two kinds of writers: those who want a detailed outline in place before they start to write actual prose, and those whose creative juices flow when they contemplate a blank piece of paper waiting to be filled with story. The second group regards an outline as a straitjacket, claiming it ruins the spontaneity they see as integral to the creative process. The first group looks upon the outline as a kind of first draft, a place where all the bugs can be ironed out before they have 170 pages under their belts. Each group tends to regard the other with suspicion: surely nobody could be crazy enough to write that way?

  I call these different types of writers Outliners and Blank-pagers. My experience teaching writing tells me that most people are very clear which group they belong to: Outliners instinctively gravitate to the index card section of the stationery store. They are the people who never go to the grocery store without a shopping list (preferably one organized according to each aisle of said store), make reservations when they go on vacation, and carry huge day planners or tiny Palm Pilots so they can schedule dinner dates well in advance. Blank-pagers, in contrast, travel without reservations, seeking the adventure of not knowing in advance where they'll be spending the night. They like the excitement of living as well as writing in the moment.

  Mystery writers tend to be Outliners, although there are notable exceptions to this non-rule. The form demands a certain precision; outlining is one way <>l testing the logical underpinnings of the mystery before

  committing oneself to paper. You can plot out the murder in a straight-line narrative, make clue packages and timelines. You can draw up maps, family trees, and dossiers for each suspect. You can begin chapter one with a file folder crammed with detailed information.

  Suspense, according to Joe Gores, "should never be outlined." His view—and it's a view endorsed by Elmore Leonard and Stephen King— is that the hero's frantic search for a way out of his dilemma is best created by the writer putting himself in that same dilemma. Write your way into a tight corner, these Blank-pagers recommend, and then write your way out of it in the cleverest way you can think of.

  Neither way is wrong or right. Some writers begin in blank page and then outline when they hit page 100 or so; others draft outlines as rough guides and then throw them away when they get into the Zone. The key is to discover which basic process works for you and modify it as needed.

  Expansion and Contraction_

  Writing a novel involves cycles of expansion and contraction. At the beginning, both Outliners and Blank-pagers are likely to be in the expansive mode, casting their nets wide for inspiration. Could the murdered man have been a blackmailer? Why not? Or was he just someone who knew too much? Let's try that on for size. Or perhaps it wasn't Harry who was murdered after all; his wife, Betty, would make an even better corpse. Or, no, not Betty—how about Melanie, the mistress?

  What mistress? Harry didn't have a mistress when I started this novel.

  But it would be so much more interesting if he did.

  And it would be even more interesting if Betty opened the door to the bedroom she shares with Harry only to find her rival's body, clad in a silk slip, lying dead on the chenille.

  At this stage, the writer is open to possibility. Whether she is jotting her ideas on index cards or scribbling prose onto the page, she is letting her muse take her where it will. She is expanding.

  At some point in the writing process, the wide net of expansion must give way to the focus of contraction. The Outliner organizes his material in advance of writing; he makes connections between characters before putting them on the page. This process is contractive; it leaves out anything that doesn't serve to move the story as a whole. Everything that's left is either part of the main plot, a subplot, or a red herring.

  Wheat's Law of the Conservation of Plot Points

  Somewhere in this process, the stolen diamond necklace that started the story may drop by the wayside. Or it may become a subplot, a clue, a red herring. According to Wheat's Law of the Conservation of Plot Points, nothing's wasted. If a mystery writer creates four solid suspects for the crime, and in the course of letting the vision change she decides to go with Number Three instead of One as the real killer, she hasn't wasted her time working up a straight-line narrative for One, because that will make a splendid red herring. How can the reader help but be convinced that One is the real killer, when the writer herself believed it for a while? The clue packages that point the reader toward One will make for a stronger red herring than the writer would have had if she'd stuck to her original plan. And Three as the killer will come as just the kind of surprise she had in mind in the first place.

  Some writers follow Raymond Chandler's advice that when things go slack, introduce a man with a gun. Don't bother explaining who he is, or connecting him to anything right away—just send him through the door and let the characters react to him. Other writers suggest, "Deliver a package." What's in the package? Anything from a severed hand to a bomb—just so it's exciting and leads to more action on the page.

  The conservation-of-plot-points part comes when the writer needs to connect that severed hand to the rest of the story. How can it connect when the writer had no idea it was going to happen until it appeared, as if by magic, on the P.I.'s battered oak desk?

  Have a look at Lawrence Block's novel The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams. Stolen baseball cards, valuable ones, are at the center of the story. It seems that everyone Bernie Rhodenbarr comes in contact with knows about these cards, even though there is no apparent reason they should know. What appears to be the kind of coincidence writing teachers warn you about turns out to be no coincidence when Block later reveals the connections among these seemingly unrelated characters.

  Hidden connections between seemingly unrelated people and things conserve your favorite characters and clues by integrating them fully into the story. They're no longer irrelevant wanderings away from the main point; they take us right back to that point, even if they get there by a circular path. That wonderfully quirky old antique dealer you can't bear to leave on the cutting-room floor can stay in the story if he turns out to be the grandfather of the client's girlfriend. It won't be a coincidence if the girlfriend suggested him as the expert the P.I. ought to see about those stolen Ming vases.

  The Outliner's Process_

  There's an upside and a downside to both processes. If you're an Outliner, you can spend a huge amount of time making ready to write without actually writing. Some outliners make themselves crazy with pre-planning. Every character has a history, every location is detailed with precision, whether it matters to the story or not. Research eats up an enormous amount of time for some Outliners, who may compound their mistake by trying to cram as much of it into their books as possible.

  If preparation enhances the final product, it's time well spent; if it doesn't, it's vamping.

  Vamping till ready: the piano player knocks out a jaunty little tune while he's waiting for the performer to step onto the stage. If the performer's a little late, the piano player repeats the vamp. He keeps on repeating it until it's time to go into the actual number. If he vamps for too long a time, the audience begins to clamor for the performer. The same is true of outlining—at some point you must begin the actual prose. You must write chapter one on a piece of paper and spill some lifeblood on the page just like every other writer on the planet.

  The Outliner needs to be aware that the tendency to want everything to be perfect before chapter one hits the page is a fantasy. No matter how hard he works to get everything in place, chapter one is a draft. It will change. There is no such thing as perfect. T
here comes a time when the Outliner has to let go of the preparation mode and get into writing mode. He's got to stop vamping and start writing.

  The Changing Vision

  The first step is to realize that while a writer begins a book with a vision, that vision is bound to change as the book takes shape. The Outliner thinks she sees the book as a whole, sitting like a pot of gold at the end of the writing rainbow. The operative words here are "she thinks." In truth, the Outliner can't see the finished book as clearly as she believes she does; there will be changes she can't imagine at the beginning, and if she's writing a living novel instead of a classroom exercise, she'd better let them happen.

  Novels are big. They take a long time to write. And in the course of that writing, things change. Pieces of the Outliner's vision stubbornly refuse to fall into place; what seemed inevitable now seems contrived and must be rethought. You look back at chapter one from the vantage point of chapter seven and long to rip it up and start over.

  What's going on?

  The vision changes. The vision grows and alters as the writer works herself deeper into the story. The best writers let this happen. They open themselves to a new vision; they permit the book to grow and shape itself according to an altered perception.

  The Outliner's Toolbox

  The process of pre-planning can occur in a number of ways. Rick Boyer, who won an Edgar award for Billingsgate Shoal, gets one of those marbled hardcover essay notebooks and fills it with a scenario of the story. His scenario may include maps and drawings, and sums up the entire action. He handwrites it, although he uses a word processor when it comes to the actual prose. It's one way of gaining overview, of managing the tremendous amount of information a writer needs to carry in his head in order to write an entire novel.

  Margaret Maron, on the other hand, fills folders with material for each chapter; when it comes time to write, say, chapter three, she'll have notes and pictures cut from magazines and articles about the topic and anecdotes she heard from a local wise woman. That folder is a kind of outline, even though it is used to stimulate the filling of a blank page.

  Maron has also created a detailed family tree for her main character, Judge Deborah Knott (who has ten brothers, so it's quite a tree), as well as a map of her fictional Colleton County, North Carolina. Particularly if you're developing a series, having visual aids to help you keep things consistent will pay off in the long run.

  Some really experienced writers—Lawrence Block and Robert B. Parker come to mind—do it all in their heads. Block "blocks out" his story (okay, take me out and shoot me) and when he has it fairly well set in his mind, he checks into a motel, plugs in his laptop, and bangs the script out in a week or two. The speed of his writing is made possible by the months of thinking work he did before the check-in.

  While it's hard to call that outlining, it is a way of pre-planning what's going to he written down. It is not the free-floating style of the true

  Blank-pager; the in-the-head writer is culling and editing as he goes, tossing out what doesn't work before it has the chance to clutter up the disk or the page.

  The essence of outlining is throwing away. The Blank-pager spills all her ideas onto a page and culls later; the Outliner narrows the focus, consolidates characters, drops subplots before committing himself to prose.

  What do you do with the stuff that's left over? Some writers make a file of out-takes, material that isn't useful for this book but might be recycled into the next novel or into a short story. The truth is that most of the stuff that hits the cutting-room floor never gets recycled, but that's not what's important; what's important is that it doesn't go into this book. A writer in the contractive stage has to be willing to let go of anything that isn't moving the central storyline.

  One of the benefits of outlining is that the culling process happens before the writer has committed himself to actual prose. It's a lot easier to lay aside a few index cards than to excise whole scenes involving a character you no longer want in the story.

  Opening Up the Story

  Sometimes a writer must move from a contraction phase back into expansion. This can happen to an Outliner whose preplanned scenes don't work on the page the way he hoped they would while in outline form.

  I had a clue once, a really brilliant and wonderful clue given to me by my local Brooklyn pizza parlor. They made specialty pizzas, and one of my favorites was rosemary chicken. Long spikes of rosemary on top of white-meat chicken spread out on a crisp pizza crust—tasty and unusual. So I decided the victim in my book would have eaten that pizza before she died; it would be in her stomach, and would point to the fact that she'd eaten at a certain pizza parlor that served this unusual dish. I used to go and eat "clue pizza" and enjoy it even more knowing how I was going to use it in my book.

  The trouble was that when I went to write the scene, I realized that the victim had no reason to go to this particular pizza parlor, which was nowhere near the scene of her death, except to eat this pizza and give my detective a clue. What had looked so terrific in outline had become contrived and illogical in the context of the story.

  If you read the finished book (Fresh Kills), you will find no reference to rosemary chicken pizza. I still mourn my pizza clue, but the good of the book as a whole demanded that I deviate from the outline and open up to a new way of finding Amber's killer.

  I had to move from the contraction phase of writing according to the outline, and go back into expansion in order to find new clues to replace my lost pizza clue. I had to brainstorm, to cast my net wide, to open myself up to a new set of what-ifs in order to solve a problem I thought I had already solved.

  Outliners can also move back into expansion by means of freewriting. This is writing without a plan, writing off the record. I've done it for different reasons at different stages of the writing process. Once I freewrote a scene between a father and daughter on the daughter's tenth birthday. This scene wasn't in the book because the daughter was fourteen when the action of the novel took place, but by letting myself see a glimpse of the father-daughter relationship at an earlier stage, I added depth to the portraits that did end up between the covers of the book. I've also written my way into certain characters by freewriting about them in their own voices, even though they will only be seen in the finished book through the eyes of my first-person main character. Both methods involve a foray into expansion during the contractive phase of writing-to-outline.

  Do the Opposite

  Does this sound like I'm telling you to do the opposite of what you've been doing?

  If so, you're getting the point. When you find yourself blocked, what you've been doing is taking you down a path that leads to frustration, so trying the opposite ought to end the frustration. The trouble is, it also makes you nervous because it's alien to your instinctive nature as a writer.

  The Outliner hates giving up that tightly knit structure, yet opening up and adding a new character, a new subplot, another clue package, is just what the book needs. Micromanaging your characters even more than you already have leads to dry, dull characters without a spontaneous thought in their heads.

  Trust is the key here. Trust in yourself and trust in your overriding vision. Trust that you won't be losing golden words and startling plot developments; you'll be gaining richer characters and even better twists and turns. Trust that there's more where the old stuff came from, that you have the talent and depth to take your material to the max and you don't have to settle lor something your heart tells you isn't working.

  The Blank-Pager's Toolbox_

  Suspense writers are more likely than mystery people to be Blank-pagers. The suspense writer likes writing her character into a corner and then extricating her by sheer wit. For a wonderful example of how this process works, try reading Stephen King's Misery, in which a writer is forced to create his story by the blank-page method. Blank-pagers are wonderful at starting books, at creating gripping situations that bring the reader into the story.

 
The crunch comes when the story has to go somewhere. Blank-pagers often come into my classes complaining that they've written one hundred pages of a novel and stopped because they had no central plotline. Great scenes, but no payoff. Several threads of story that never wove themselves into a coherent whole. The downside of spontaneity is that a novel needs a spine, and the Blank-pager may not understand how to give it one.

  How can Blank-pagers pull their stories together without losing the spark of spontaneity?

  Blank-pagers go through a contraction process, too. Some don't do it until they've finished an entire first draft. They want to work their way through the story step by step, then set the manuscript aside for a bit and go back in with a hacksaw. They can't decide what to leave out and what to emphasize in chapter one until they've seen how the final chapter plays out.

  But some Blank-pagers don't want to wait until the end. They are the ones who come into class with ten chapters of a book that, when looked at correctly, will emerge as three or four stories piled on top of one another. There's the storyline about the stolen diamond necklace; there's the mysterious package delivered to the house; there's Harry and his mistress meeting for the last time at a seedy bar near the bus station; there's a man at the bus station asking for directions and saying something about "paying back Melanie." How does it all hang together? And who is that man at the bus station?

  The first thing the Blank-pager in this situation must do is stop writing. The natural tendency of the Blank-pager is to solve all writing problems by scaring up a new storyline; all this does is add another wing to an already sprawling house. (If you've ever been to the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, you'll see the architectural equivalent of this process. Sarah Winchester, widow of the inventor of the Winchester rifle, was told she'd die when she finished building her house, so—she never finished! She built stairways to nowhere, rooms too tiny to stand up in, and innumerable windows peering into blank walls. Not a house you'd want to live in—and not a book you'd want to read.)