Did I mention we had snow a few days ago!

Cutting Edge Cliché: Fire Up or Fire-Up

A couple of years ago, I started noticing mystery and thriller writers--who shall go nameless--using "fire up,", as in "he fired up the Corvette and chased ..." Now it's as if there is no other way to say someone started the engine of a car for these writers, and, to make things worse, the use has spread to things like computers.

Enough already!

Use"Said" Only if Necessary: Elmore Leonard's Third Rule modified by his Tenth

Elmore Leonard's third rule of writing: " Never use a verb other than 'said' to carry dialogue." And the tenth: "Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip."

Most of the time you don't need "said" or any other word to connect dialogue to the speaker; just use the dialogue and the reader can figure it out. Here's a the beginning of a scene by Walter Mosley in The Long Fall. The private eye gets a return call from a man he just spoke to.

"Hello?"
"Who hired you?"
"It's not polite to hang up on a brother, Roger."
"I'm not your brother."
"You still hung up on me."
"Excuse me," he said, maybe even meant it. "I'm not used to private detectives calling me on the phone."
"You called me," I reminded him.
"You came to my office."

Enough said!

Conversation Interrupted

How do you format dialogue when one character interrupts another? Just use a couple of em dashes.
See how Dennis Lehane does it in Mystic River, page 261.

“Sure. Hell, I think she still loves me.” He stubbed out his cigarette. "She calls me all the time. Calls me and doesn't talk." 

"Wait, she—"

"I know," he said.

"—calls you up and doesn't say a word?"

Don't forget to use an em dash, not an en dash or a hyphen. For the difference, check out this site: http://cutewriting.blogspot.ca/2008/06/en-dash-em-dash-and-hyphen.html#axzz2JfAbcmyO

Close Third Person on Steroids

As a result of a suggestion from my mystery writing-group buddy, Nancy McQueen, I just read the "Victory Lap," the opening story in George Saunders in Tenth of December: Stories.

Here's a sample. A teenage character has decided to go to the aid of the girl next door who is being abducted by a bad guy (whom the teenager will thump with a geode).

Then he was running. Across the lawn. Oh God! What was he doing, what he doing? Jesus, shit, the directives he was violating! Running in the yard (bad for the sod); transporting a geode without its protective wrapping; hopping the fence, which stressed the fence, which had cost a pretty penny; leaving the yard barefoot; entering the Secondary Area without permission; entering the creek barefoot (broken glass, dangerous microorganisms), and not only that, oh God, suddenly he saw what this giddy part of himself intended, which was to violate a directive so Major and absolute that it wasn't even a directive, since you didn't need a directive to know how totally verboten it was--

He burst out the creek ... and let the geode fly into his [the other guy's] head ... the skull visibly indented and the guy sat right on his ass.

Yes! Score! It was fun! Fun dominating a grown-up! Fun using the most dazzling gazelle-like speed ever seen  in the history of mankind to dash soundlessly across space and master this huge galoot, who otherwise, right now, would be --

Chekhov's advice--Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on the broken glass--describes what Saunders does with the boy. He doesn't tell us the boy is feeling constrained or guilty because he is breaking the rules set for him by his parents; he lets us look inside the boys head to see and feel for ourselves. The result is vivid writing--not hard to spot, but difficult to replicate.

 

Wow! I've been away forever. At least it seems this way; even the set-up has changed. To top it all off, my new year's resolution was one word: discipline. And I could sure use some here.

One excuse: we were in China.

I'll be back sooner than last time.

Metaphors Musings and James Lee Burke

Metaphors are a great way of conveying imagery, meaning or mood with brevity and impact.

Rather than a paragraph describing in detail the vines on a spooky house, consider something like this: “Vines, like tentacles, climbed the east wall.” If you don’t like similes: “The vine’s tentacles clung to the bricks …”

James Lee Burke is a master. In Rain Gods (page 5) he uses a simile to describe shell casings, to create a macabre mood and to foreshadow the finding of dead bodies: “Scattered about the churches interior, glinting like gold teeth, were dozens of shell casings.”

Of course metaphors are a great way to convey the feelings of a POV character: “He felt a pressure band tightening around his head.” Or how that character perceives something or someone; for example, the character looks at someone whose “eyes are like marbles pushed into tallow”—same book, at page 201.

As for an image: “a rear like a washtub”— at 150.”