How to rite Killer Fiction

by Carolyn Wheat

  The second thing the writer must do is reread what she already has and ask herself which of her storylines excites her the most. Is it the diamond necklace? Is it the relationship between Melanie, the mistress, and her mother? Is it that scene where Betty broke down in tears as she confessed that she'd known about Harry's mistress for years but never said anything?

  One of the storylines is going to be more interesting to you than the others. Maybe it's the last one to enter the mix-, maybe it's the one that's gotten the most ink. Whatever the reason for choosing one, the important thing is to decide which storyline will dominate the book.

  Now comes the hard part. Out come the scissors and paste. Everything that doesn't relate to the newly chosen main story goes. You may open an out-takes file and put all the nonusable prose into it in hopes that it will form the germ of a second book or a short story, but the important thing now is to get it out of the novel. Only the scenes that move the main story will remain—and the ten chapters you started with may boil down to three and a half.

  Don't worry. Your three and a half chapters will form the nucleus of a book you have a chance of actually finishing.

  Give Your Characters Jobs

  After a writer in the contractive stage has identified a main story and culled out any storylines that don't move that main story, she can begin to focus on character. Are all the characters employed? Do they have jobs to do, and are they doing them?

  By "jobs" I don't mean what they do when they leave their fictional houses; I mean what is their role in the story? How do they move the plot, develop character, act as ally or opponent to the main character? If the book is a mystery, the major characters will be suspects, and as such, they must act suspicious. They must lie, they must refuse to answer questions, they must possess motive and means and opportunity. A party scene filled with fascinating characters speaking witty dialogue is not an asset to the mystery unless that dialogue is being spoken by suspects acting suspicious. As mere window dressing, it goes.

  In the same vein, incidents, objects, and settings should be examined to see whether they could produce clues for the detective. The Outliner will already have her clue packages ready to slip into the scenes; the Blank-pager may wish to reread her prose and highlight anything that might become a clue with a little reshaping. The Blank-pager might want to use a few Outliner tools like maps and timelines to help focus what he's already written.

  Connections between characters can also help focus the story; the Outliner undoubtedly knows that Ted is really Sarah's former lover, but this may come as a shock to the Blank-pager, who has just discovered this fact through writing a scene in which Ted suddenly confessed this hitherto unknown connection. The Blank-pager will want to reread former chapters involving both Ted and Sarah and make notes for revision to enhance the relationship, which will tighten the story considerably.

  Suspense characters have jobs, too. In the early stages of the story, characters may be shown to be supportive of the hero—which will make their later betrayal and abandonment of her all the more poignant. The Blank-pager may reread her material and highlight characters to be developed into allies or obstacles in revision.

  Writers are gardeners of words. We plant, weed, fertilize, trim, and hoe only to receive as the highest compliment the praise that "it looks so natural." Making your writing read as if it flowed effortlessly from your keyboard takes hard work.

  Weeding

  Blank-pagers write their way into the story. When introducing a new character, they're likely to write five pages of backstory because they're learning it as they write. This leaves them with a lot of unusable prose, which is no sin in a first draft, but that unusable prose has no business surviving to a second draft. It has to go. Pulling it out and leaving the good stuff is one basic task all Blank-pagers have to learn.

  Scissors and paste are necessary tools of the writer's trade even in the cyber-age, mainly because you simply can't see enough on the screen. You need to do big-picture revision by making piles on the floor or table—one for each arc, to begin with. All that backstory, all those flashbacks you loaded into your first draft Arc One need to be moved to the second and third piles, to become integrated into your second draft Arcs Two and Three.

  Once you've done this at the arc level, it's time to revise each and every scene.

  Pull out everything that doesn't work. Strip your manuscript of all extraneous material, be it subplot or information or description. If it isn't moving the story in some way, it goes. Whole paragraphs, pages, chapters may litter the floor; that doesn't matter so long as your plants have room to grow.

  Once you've done that preliminary work, it's time to look at what's left.

  Nurturing the Seedlings

  Even some of the good stuff may have to go. Two characters who play essentially the same role in the hero's life = one too many.

  Any character without a job needs to either get one or leave the story. Play them or trade them—but don't let them take up space without contributing to the overall story.

  Sharpen the scenes by cutting as much filler as you can. We don't usually need to follow the detective as he gets from here to there; just take us to where the scene begins and start there. Cut those little "and then I went home" tails off the scenes and give them zippier closing lines. Cut long descriptions of people or places and telescope the action into as concise and punchy a format as possible. Watch out for walk-on characters that dissipate the tension between the important characters.

  Check the subplots for relevance to the through line. If a subplot seems unconnected with the main story, then you have two choices: connect it or lose it. Since you didn't lose it in the weeding process, you've decided to connect it. Now's the time—how can that greedy brother-in-law who stole from the family business possibly relate to the larger tale?

  Maybe the entire story is about greed and what it does to people, so the brother-in-law subplot acts as a low-rent counterpoint to the world-class greed of the big villain. And the brother-in-law's gambling problem, which led him to embezzle, makes him the perfect pawn for Mr. Big Bad Guy, so he's the one who sent our hero that dead fish and warned him to stay away from Mr. Big.

  One subplot saved.

  I know—you're getting worried that all this cutting will leave you with a 125-page book, and you know that's not enough.

  Relax. Thinning die seedlings is only the first part of the exercise.

  Fertilizing

  Now that you have less prose to work with, it's time to strengthen that prose as much as possible. Go back to the storyboard and re-ask some of the same questions:

  • Have I used enough sensory language in my description?

  • Does my description of place adequately reflect the inherent dangers that are going to become overwhelmingly important in Arc Four?

  • Does my description include my viewpoint character's emotional response to this place?

  • Have I left out any logistical setup information the reader has to know in order to make the hero's victory over evil in this place believable?

  • Have I used absolutely every interesting aspect of this place somewhere in the story?

  • What things are in this place that can or will be used later on? (We don't suddenly discover that there's a nice cache of weapons hidden in the old cave in chapter twenty; we'd better know it's there a lot earlier than that if we don't want our reader throwing the book against the wall.)

  • Are there any associations, or memories associated with the place, that could give rise to some nice secrets or emotional resonance later on?

  Do the same with character. If my villain is going to turn out to be a greedy man killing and betraying people for money, let's see some of that hunger for material goods early on. It may be a subtle reference to always flying first class or a silk shirt or a flashy car, but it needs to be planted early for us to get the full flavor.

  Revision _

  Revision: some writers hate it, others embrace it
like a lover. Either way, it's a flat-out necessity if a writer wants to move from the amateur "I love to write but when it gets too hard I just start another project" stage to the "I'm going to make this book as good as I possibly can no matter how much work it takes" determination that separates the pros from the wannabes.

  How much revision does the average writer do? How many drafts does it take to go from rotten first draft (and it's important to realize that all first drafts are rotten) to award-winning, critically acclaimed bestseller?

  It depends. The only thing one can say for certain is that producing a publishable novel is a long-haul proposition and that you have to revise until the book is as close as you can bring it to absolutely, totally perfect.

  I agree with Jack Nicholson, whose motto is "Everything counts." That's what he said when he was awarded the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award, and it applies to writing as well as to acting. Everything, from characters to commas, from whether or not New York's Fifth Avenue is one-way going south or north to the exact properties of atropine, counts.

  Why?

  Because one little mistake can kick the reader out of the story. Suddenly she's not lost in a dream, she's reading a book and the characters aren't real anymore, they're just funny little black marks on a white page and you've lost her.

  The Good-Enough Chapter One

  Premature revision is a major cause of difficulties among beginning writers. They work chapter one to the point of exhaustion, trying to make it as perfect as possible, and then they wonder why their stamina fails by the time they reach chapter four.

  The leading cause of premature revision among writers is writing teachers.

  I know because I am one. My students submit a perfectly dreadful draft they call chapter one. I read it and make extensive comments on it. They rewrite it and resubmit it. I make more comments. They rewrite it again, I make more comments, and—

  Well, you see the problem. The student wants a nice big gold star on her paper and I want to earn my princely salary as a teacher, so we play this little game, both of us pretending that if I give enough feedback the student can achieve perfect chapter one-ness.

  She can't.

  And I can't help her do it, because neither of us, at this stage of the process, has the slightest idea what the perfect chapter one for this book looks like. All she can do is write the good-enough chapter one, and all I can do for her is recognize that good-enough chapter one when I see it.

  The good-enough chapter one allows the writer to keep moving, which is all she needs at this point in time. It sets up enough of the story to be going on with, it introduces the characters in such a way that we care enough to keep reading. It may well be that when the writer reaches Plot Point One, she can look back and realize that the story didn't really start until chapter three. She can then lop off her early chapters and recognize the former chapter three as the new, improved chapter one, but there was no way on God's earth she could have done that before she actually wrote chapter three.

  The Non-Revision Revision

  I once had a book whose first chapter I revised to the point where my computer files contained C1a, C1b, C1c, all the way to, I swear to God, C1m. That's over half the alphabet, meaning I had thirteen, count them, 13, different versions of that chapter one bouncing around on my floppy disks.

  I don't recommend this method of revision.

  I also don't recommend the method used by a friend, who felt that every single change in the plot or characters mandated a thorough rewrite of every chapter that went before, so that a change in chapter eighteen had her rewriting chapter one on up.

  My solution: the non-revision revision, or Notes for Revision.

  You've just finished chapter three and it's wonderful, the best thing you've ever written, how could you be more clever, only the problem is that the new chapter three doesn't fit with your old chapter one. Your fingers itch with the deep desire to go in and rewrite chapter one.

  Try not to. Instead, take a blank piece of paper and write at the top: Notes for Revision, C1. Then jot down all the things you'd do to chapter one if you were revising, which you're not, you're just making notes. Try to keep doing this with your early chapters until you reach Plot Point One, otherwise known as the end of Arc One.

  Once you've reached the end of your first arc, you're in a much better position to revise, because you can assess all that you've put on the page in terms of that arc goal. You can see which sections move the characters toward the climax and which are just filler. You can sharpen the conflicts and define the characters in terms of their relationship to that arc goal.

  Sometimes you just can't wait to revise. If your chapter one wasn't really good enough, you have to revise until it is. If you need a new scene that isn't on the page, write it and insert it between the existing scenes, but resist the urge to revise the already written material.

  Writing Is Rewriting

  Whether you're an Outliner or a Blank-pager, whether you prefer the expansive or the contractive phase of the process, whether you revise as you go or dash off a complete draft before you return to the scene of the crime, you must revise. Revision is the heart of the process; it's what separates the pros from those who "always wanted to write if only they had the time." Only after you're sure you've written the best book you possibly can will you be able to write the magic words the end.

  The Writing Process: Tools to Help You Finish

  Two Competing Forces: Expansion and Contraction

  Expansion

  • "what if?"

  • casting the net wide

  • brainstorming

  • letting characters have their way with the story

  Contraction

  • picking and choosing

  • making connections

  • giving each character a fiction "job"

  • letting go of material that doesn't fit overall story

  Two Kinds of Writers: Outliners and Blank-pagers

  Outliners

  • prepare for writing

  • make connections before starting

  • focus material before starting to write

  • cut extraneous plots and characters before starting

  • create materials that won't be in finished book (maps, dossiers, calendars)

  Blank-pagers

  • fall in love with an empty white page

  • go where it takes them

  • let characters do what they want

  • use the edge that uncertainty brings

  • write characters into corners and then write them out again

  • save the contractive stage for revision and revise extensively

  What they each have to learn:

  • Outliners have to learn that there's no substitute for actual writing, that they can't control the process to the point of writing a perfect first draft, and that they have to allow for spontaneity during the writing.

  • Blank-pagers have to learn to love revision, because they have so much of it to do. They also have to learn to let go of plotlines and characters that don't advance the book as a whole.

  The expansive stage is easy and fun; it's the contractive stage that's work. So...

  • focus on what turns you on right now, no matter what you loved before

  • cut as much backstory as possible and see what's left

  • consider putting two characters together to make one stronger character

  • drop any character who doesn't have a "job" to do in the story

  • drop all subplots that don't relate in some way to main story, or, make those characters and subplots related somehow

  • focus on conflict and opposition to strengthen the plot; raise the stakes

  • work the arcs

  • think in scenes

  Middlebook and how to survive it:

  • increase tension by setting the stopwatch or planting the bomb— or both

  • let the pendulum swing between safety and
danger, trust and mistrust, in ever-increasing arcs

  • build to the climax by raising stakes and closing off options until main character is forced to final confrontation

  • "turn all the rats loose"—but tie up all subplots before Arc Four

  • use mini-arcs and subplot arcs to heighten tension within big plot

  • make sure every scene serves more than one purpose

  • build to strong climax and then give that climax its full value

  Revision—love it or leave the business.

  • "anything that doesn't kill this book makes it stronger"

  • "the-good-of-the-book-as-a-whole"—allows you to kiss that scene good-bye

  • cut away scaffolding and leave the building

  • work the arcs, making sure each plot point is built up to and gets full play

  • the important question: what am I revising for?

  • plan on three or four full revisions, some carpentry, some textual

  Writer's Block Is a Gift—Use It Wisely

  • yeah, some gift. Where can I go to return it?

  • the problem with chapter four may lie in chapter eight and vice versa

  • do the opposite of what you've been doing:

  if you've been expanding, try contracting if you've been contracting, try expanding

  • go deeper into character; maybe there's a good reason your character refuses to do what you want her to do

  • try freewriting on a scene that won't be in the finished book

  • go over all notes, all the way back to square one, and highlight what you love

  • let go of everything that isn't working (use the out-takes file if it helps)

  • trust that you have more within you to replace what isn't working

  • once in a while, go to the beach and forget about your book. Let the plot simmer on the back burner of your mind

  "WHEN DO you write? How many hours a day do you write? Are you a morning writer? Do you have a schedule? Do you write a certain number of pages a day? Do you write on a computer or do you use a quill pen?

  Do aspiring writers ask published writers questions like these because they think there's some magic answer that spells the difference between published and not-yet published?