by Marge Piercy
Maybe you want to envision a more enlightened society, one that offers a lot more of something than our own—equality, harmony, peace, whatever. Utopian fiction is a related genre. It tends to be produced when a number of people believe that things can change. It is a visionary form of fiction but again, whether it works or not depends not only on the quality of ideas and inspiration involved, but in the creation of believable characters in some sort of ongoing action in a setting that we come to accept as plausible and real to us. The vice of much utopian fiction is being too static and far too expositional. All such works have to function as fiction before they can do anything else.
Maybe you just want to play: suppose we had the power to change shapes at will. Suppose we could live for five hundred years. Suppose we had both lungs and gills. Suppose we could read each other’s thoughts. Suppose sickness was eradicated. Suppose we could choose special genetic traits for our offspring. Suppose we could freely clone ourselves. Suppose suddenly we learned to communicate with other mammals or birds, one on one. What kind of society, what kind of life, what kind of people and families and jobs and problems would result?
Sometimes writers create fantastic worlds peopled by dragons or talking horses or sentient trees. You can create any kind of world you can make us believe in, provided it is created with consistent, vivid detail and peopled with beings who intrigue us with events and problems and situations that engage us. Loosening your imagination can only help you as a writer, and perhaps some version of these related genres may be your forte.
Exercise:
Invent or select a superhero—probably easier, so long as you are familiar with her or him either from comic books or film—and tell a story in which his or her powers cannot solve the problem with which your hero is faced.
Exercise:
Create an alien and put her or him on Earth. What kind of society does your protagonist come from? What does your protagonist expect from Earth and how are they surprised? What strikes them as good and what strikes them as terrible and what do they find ridiculous? Of course these reactions will issue from your protagonist’s own values, the values of her or his culture, interacting with our societies.
Exercise:
Imagine a protagonist in a situation where suddenly she or he becomes convinced that everyone around them is lying. What you are doing in an exercise like this is extrapolating from a common fear or disappointment or kind of everyday paranoia to a more metaphorical form.
MYSTERIES
Books that are shelved with mysteries may or may not concern a mystery. Crime novels are included in this class: we follow the perpetrator rather than the investigator. We know from the onset who done it or rather who is about to do it, but we follow the progress of the crime and then the aftermath, the pursuit, usually but not inevitably, the arrest and perhaps the trial. There have been stories of successful criminals, often a kind of Robin Hood, outside the law but not outside our sympathies. The story of a heist falls into this category.
A similar story concerned with process is the police procedural. This requires a great deal of knowledge of how various police departments operate and how the different types of investigations proceed. There are useful manuals for writers about police methods and forensic methodology, but it would help immensely in making such a book believable and fresh to have some inside knowledge. No type of story so exposes the writer who is faking it as the police procedural. There are, of course, subgenres focusing not on the police but on a coroner or a forensic expert. No matter what kind of procedural you are interested in writing, you must know the field you are dealing with thoroughly.
The classic mystery involves how a crime is committed as well as who committed it and why. There have been many fashions in private detectives over the decades—the scientific amateur who is more observant than any fly (Sherlock Holmes); the gentleman who dabbles in solving mysteries and runs mental circles around the police (Lord Peter of Dorothy Sayers’ many novels); the noir private eye originated by Dashiell Hammett; the apparently ditzy old lady who knows human nature and has the brain of a guillotine (Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple); the tough young woman (Sarah Peretsky’s V. I. Warshawski) or even the very young woman ever up for adventure (Nancy Drew); the able but contemporarily sensitive male (Robert Parker’s Spenser). There are hundreds of variations on each of these. Some mysteries have as their protagonist a policeman without belonging to the procedural subgenre. Think of P. D. James’s Adam Dalgliesh, who writes poetry.
Another way to plot a mystery is to involve as detective an “innocent,” in the sense we use innocent bystander. Someone who accidentally sees a crime or stumbles on the results of it or otherwise becomes entangled uses her or his innate intelligence or their special knowledge (as an insurance actuary, as a librarian, as a whale watch captain, as a landscape gardener) to solve the mystery. The mystery comes to the protagonist, rather than it being her or his profession to solve the problem. Maybe a partner, a lover, a family member is killed or attacked. Maybe something is taken from the house.
Avoid clichés. The hard boiled detective has been done to death, yet every few months at the press, we get a barely updated version. As with any other type of writing, if you want to write detective stories, read detective stories. It might be best to start with what you know. If you work in a flower shop, why not have a florist detective. If you work at the university as Amanda Cross—Carolyn Heilbrun—did, or Lev Raphael, then you might do best to use that setting for your murders or other crimes.
Of course there are crossovers—a number of writers use historical settings for their mysteries. An archeologist sets her crimes in Egypt. A historian uses New Amsterdam. Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose was set in 1327 in a Benedictine abbey. These have a double appeal—to lovers of mysteries and to lovers of historical fiction. Plus with good details and an interesting period detective, they feel quite fresh.
The more individualized the detective is, the more of a past and private life and social ambience she or he has, the more we will be drawn into the story. If the detective does not engage us, it is rare that the plot will. Plotting is more important to the mystery than to any of the other genres we have discussed, but without good characterization, we will probably lose interest; even if we read the book to solve the puzzle, we will forget it five minutes later. We certainly won’t go looking for more books by that author.
You must decide whether your detective is a loner, whether she or he has a partner, a sidekick, a superior, a love interest, a competitive rival. Putting your detective into at least a few important relationships often makes him or her more interesting and enables you also to show their character rather than telling us about it. If they have no relationships, then why? Husband tragically killed in a botched operation—or murdered. Maybe the murder was never solved. Maybe a subplot concerns a resolution of that old painful mystery.
If you are going to use court scenes in your story, please, please visit the relevant type of court. Don’t base your notion of what goes on in courtrooms from what you have seen on television. Reality is quite different on all levels. I have sat in on trials in Barnstable Court, in Superior Court in Boston, in night court in Manhattan, among others, when I was using these places. It is surprising how many manuscripts we see in which it is painfully clear that the writer has never been in a real courtroom. Don’t fake it when it is so easy just to go in and watch and listen. Follow a case through from beginning to end, or sit through a morning or afternoon of minor cases, one after the other. As soon as you get home, take notes. Even if it is far more mundane—a friend who is a courtroom reporter for a large newspaper describes his beat as very routine: bad people doing bad things—the reality is very different than the TV version of justice.
Befriend a lawyer of the relevant type and go to court when they are defending a client or pursuing a civil case. Ask questions. As we recommended in the chapter on research, learn how to interview. Never be hesitant to ask questions. I have h
ad a few informants who stonewalled me over the years, but ninety percent of the time, people are delighted to talk with you about their work experiences. (Here’s a conversation starter: Ask them whether they believe TV or movies get it right.)
If you are writing about a specific place, even if you know it well, it would be a good idea to revisit it. If you’ve never been there, get there. Travel books and guides are no replacement for on-the-spot looking, listening, smelling, touching. The kind of clouds, the kind of light, the architecture, the feel of the streets, the street vendors and their foods, the noise levels at different times of day and night, the kind of vehicles and how they are driven and how they are parked. You may not need more than a day or two in a place, but you need that actual soaking up of sensory details to make your local color work. Readers of mysteries can be truly annoyed if you misplace a building or screw up the orientation of a street or move a park upriver. Maybe you think the copy editor will catch these blunders if you do get your novel published; don’t count on it.
In the chapter on Description, we talk about the uses and abuses of description. When a detective is trying to solve a mystery, the details of the rooms and workplaces of suspects are extremely important.
In mysteries even more than any other type of novel, the ending is of crucial importance. Many stories simply trail off. Things stop. We may or may not learn the fate of the characters. But with a mystery, the ending must solve the crime and finger the perpetrator. The end must satisfy. It must issue from the plot, from what we have learned along the way, and it must make perfect sense to the reader. The reader must be persuaded that the solution is a genuine one and answers all the critical questions. If the ending is not satisfactory (the famous cliché, “the butler did it”), then the book did not work as a mystery and the reader is correct to feel cheated. You must persuade your readers that the detective has figured out the who, how and why and that they have laid it out in a manner that convinces you.
We should as readers not be able to guess quickly who did it and/or how, or whatever the mystery is, but we should have a fair shot at figuring it out. We should feel that the clues were there and that if we missed them, it was our fault and not the writer’s. In other words, either we guessed correctly or we feel we could have if only we had been more alert. That satisfies the reader. A wild card ending does not. You cannot introduce a new character or one who only appeared on page 70 as the unmasked perpetrator. Whatever your ending, it must be plausible. If, at the end, we find out that there was no murder but Katherine fell down the steps because she had a brain tumor and lost her sense of balance, we must feel that that, too, was a possible, if improbable, outcome; and the clues to that situation have to be carefully planted.
Clues are extremely important. You want to figure them out before you begin so that you can drop them along the way, not too obviously but fairly. An interesting device is the clue that apparently points to one suspect, but upon much closer examination or future development implicates another.
Now whether you are writing a police procedural or a detective novel, you have to deal with motive. You cannot simply beg the question. “Otis killed Pamela, we have proved that, but who can say what he was thinking of.” No way. You, the author, have to know Otis through and through and you have to make his motives and his actions plausible to us, so that once we come to understand Otis, we believe him capable of bludgeoning poor Pamela; or we see why he believed himself in a situation so tight and hopeless, the only way out was through Pamela. Or we see that his world view was such that he held Pamela responsible for everything bad and disappointing in his life. It won’t work to present him as sane and responsible and then on page 301, have him revealed as a mad psychopath who killed Pamela because he felt like doing so.
So you had better figure out a great deal before you sit down to write a mystery: What is the crime? How is it discovered? Who did it? What were the criminal’s motives? Where did the crime occur? Who was close enough and with enough apparent motive to be one of the suspects? Who witnessed what? What other clues do you want to insert into your narrative at what points in its unfolding? What is your detective like? What brings them on the scene—their profession, their connections, their relationship to the victim or to one or more of the suspects, simple curiosity, fear, anger? What leads will prove to be red herrings or dead ends? Which might appear to point one way initially and then later implicate someone else? How will your detective figure out the perpetrator? How will she or he confront or arrest or otherwise bring the criminal to justice? Are you going to stop with that discovery or go on into trial?
Thus the mystery is one of the least improvisational of forms. The historical novel is grounded in research; the mystery may well be also grounded in research, but plotting is far more important than in any of the other branches of fiction we have discussed. You need to know exactly where you’re going before you begin so that you can bring the reader along with you all the way to your denouement when the truth is revealed.
The justice meted out at the end has to satisfy our sense of justice. There are occasions when the detective will uncover the perpetrator but will let him or her go. Sherlock Holmes did that several times. He appointed himself judge and jury and gave a sentence of exile. That was because he did not believe justice would be served by punishing the perpetrator; in some sense, he felt the crime was justified. This is unusual but not unheard of. What is universal is that whatever end the perpetrator comes to, we the readers should find it just.
Exercise:
Invent a detective. She or he should be a fresh take on the role. Is your detective a professional or amateur? What time period do they live in? Historical or contemporary? Where does the story take place? Write a short scene in which your detective is set into action questioning one of the suspects or nosing about for clues. Reveal your detective’s character by their action in the scene, by the questions they ask, and their attitudes towards others.
Exercise:
Attempt to approach someone in the crime profession to ask them questions about their work. Some may be suspicious but others are proud of what they do, feel underappreciated and are happy to talk about their expertise. Often they feel that no writer has ever captured the reality of their profession. Try a couple of cops, or a coroner. (Ira used to strike up conversations with the local medical examiner at the post office and was invited back to his office and shown decades of files and morbid snapshots of crime scenes. The old Doc was eager to share his knowledge and prove his expertise.)
12
Writing Short Stories
Inexperienced writers often ask where a published writer’s inspiration comes from, as if expecting to hear that if you take a certain chemical or say a particular mantra or read a certain how-to book, an angel or muse will appear and hand you a story to complete. If you become a published writer, you will find that people ask you, inevitably someone at every reading, “Where do you get your ideas?” Where stories come from doesn’t matter.
Ideas come from the evening paper or the six o’clock news. Ideas come from scraps of conversation overhead in restaurants and airports. Ideas come from people we observe who look intriguing, little scenes we witness whose meaning we often cannot even guess but that we use to build stories around. I once wrote a short story prompted by the drawing of a woman on the cover of a paperback of no other interest. I still have no idea why that drawing caught my attention but I began at once to create the character that would inhabit her and the story that grew around her.
Ideas rarely come from the stories people insist on telling you at parties. “You want to write about my Aunt Edna,” they say, buttonholing you by the hors d’oeuvres. “You should write a book about her. Her life is so fascinating. She married the same husband three times.”
I always suggest they write the story themselves. We are all drawn to certain stories and simply not led to enter others willingly. Trying to forcefeed someone a story is useless. I cannot remember a single
occasion in all my years of writing novels and stories when such an insistently told anecdote resulted in anything but mild or excruciating boredom, but even if the story proves interesting to hear, it does not follow that it would make a successful short story for me—or you.
One source of course is the great storehouse of received tales, legends, biographies, fairy and folk tales, and myths. I have dealt with several myths, including the golem, the artificial being of kabbalah. It was a story told to me by my grandmother when I was a little girl and it stuck with me. It is a tale rooted in Jewish history and ghetto storytelling and came to me already trailing centuries of connotation and meaning. Stories you heard in your childhood, whether of people in your family or imaginary beings, tend to have a particular resonance that bears exploring.
Some stories may not come from our own heritage but still speak to us. Perhaps Faust has meaning for you and you can do something entirely new with it. You have a new angle on selling your soul to the devil, not an uncommon deal to imagine in a society obsessed with wealth. Perhaps The Picture of Dorian Gray speaks to you about contemporary vanity. Maybe you just have a new take on Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter or what one of Hemingway’s women was thinking.