Writing & Craft

Kindle Scout in Memoriam

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Originally published at Hidden Gems Books.

At the end of May Amazon’s e-publishing venture Kindle Scout was put to rest after a run of three-plus years. Amazon announced the winding down in an email sent to all of the program’s registered users (“Scouts” in Amazon’s parlance) on April 2. The email was cool and understated considering the subject matter: “[W]e wanted to let you know of some upcoming changes being made to the Kindle Scout program” followed by businesslike details of the program’s orderly shutdown. Amazon’s Kindle Scout was an innovative approach to publishing never before tried, yet it died with neither a bang nor a whimper, but with the clearing of a throat.

Reader-powered publishing

Let’s rewind and look at what made Kindle Scout so different in the publishing world. Rather than the traditional process of publishing—unknown authors cold-submitting into a mountainous slush-pile while well-known authors are courted by editors—Kindle Scout tacked a direction both democratic and meritocratic in nature, a process it dubbed “reader-powered publishing.”

It worked like this: Writers submitted their novels to Kindle Scout for consideration. Kindle Scout posted the first three chapters on their Amazon.com web site along with the book’s cover, author’s bio, and so forth. Readers perused these novels much like bookstore patrons sample paperbacks from a rotating wire rack. Readers—”Scouts”—could then vote on which novels they wanted to see published. (Scouts were rewarded for participating by receiving free ebooks of accepted work, which in turn drove reviews and ratings on Amazon.) Each books’ nomination campaign lasted thirty days, giving authors ample motivation to promote their work via the social networks, word-of-mouth, message boards—some even purchased online click-through advertising for their campaigns.

If an author earned enough attention from Scouts (and the approval of the Amazon editors) they could secure a contract with Kindle Press, the e-publishing arm of Amazon that administered Kindle Scout. The contract included publication in Kindle format (sorry, no paperback), a $1,500 advance, fifty-fifty ebook royalties, and marketing backed by Amazon’s muscle power. Not shabby for any struggling writer attempting to break into the publishing world.

Kindle Scout’s first round of winners were announced on November 27, 2014. Over the next three and half years, Kindle Scout would select for publication nearly 300 titles of all genres and styles. Books ranged from the straightforward to the bizarre, from romance to science-fiction to historical dramas to novels of literary intent. Kindle Press was not a publisher of genre fiction—it published everything.

Royal Date by Sariah Wison is one of Kindle Scout’s biggest success stories.

Kindle Scout’s semi-open approach to publication was bolder than it sounds. An unspoken belief in the traditional publishing world is that book editors have reached their position because they’re fit to judge a novel on its artistic merits and profit possibilities—editors are the professionals, the gatekeepers, the tastemakers, the adults in the room. Granting Scouts that responsibility and power sounds absurd on the face of it. After all, anyone with an Amazon account could sign-up and start voting—who do you know without an Amazon account? And yet—it worked.

In addition to the manuscript itself, Kindle Scout expected writers to provide a submission package: a 45-character tag line (harder than it sounds!), a book description, a thank-you note for Scouts, and even the book’s cover. Off-loading these tasks on the author meant the writer was wearing shoes normally reserved for book agents and front-line editors. Kindle Press sometimes released the author’s submission package as-is with no editorial or artistic revisions. (Unfortunately, this led to an early reputation of publishing “trash” novels fostered in part by a snarky write-up in Slate magazine.) Later on, editorial services were offered to accepted writers. Some books received new covers after publication gratis Kindle Press.

Kindle Scout was one-part bold experiment, one-part do-it-yourself publishing, and one-part partnering with Amazon’s marketing might. Another way to put it: Kindle Scout was turn-key independent publishing for the small-time author ready to step up their game.

My experience

When I submitted my novel Bridge Daughter to Kindle Scout, that’s pretty much how I viewed the program: An experiment in independent publishing with potential big returns. I’d shopped my book around to a handful of agents with the usual discouraging results and form-letter responses. Curious, I studied Kindle Scout’s FAQ and legal boilerplate and thought it was worth a go. If nothing else, I knew I’d kick myself later if I didn’t at least try.

My attraction to Kindle Scout was not merely its web-savvy nomination process. Kindle Scout’s winners list boasted publisher-friendly genres like romance and epic fantasy as well as quiet and quirky work. I found myself drawn to novels like Katie O’Rourke’s family drama Finding Charlie, Erik Therme’s chilling Resthaven, and Bradley Wind’s wonderfully personal A Whole Lot.

With my novel prepped and submission package assembled, I filled in Kindle Scout’s online form, clicked a mouse button, and sent my book into the aether. Four days later, my book was on the Kindle Scout web site and accepting votes. If you’ve submitted work to agents or literary magazines and waited months for a response, four days probably sounds like sheer fantasy. It was another example of Kindle Scout ignoring accepted norms in the publishing world.

Plenty of people (including myself) pondered the skeleton key leading to publication. Was it page views of your book’s Scout page during the nomination period? The number of reader nominations? Kindle Scout’s secret sauce was its mysterious “Hot & Trending” badge which signified growing interest in your book. Speculation surrounding the algorithm was so rampant, disreputable “services” arose on the Internet purporting to guarantee thirty days of Hot & Trending for a modest nonrefundable fee.

It may sound naive, but I suspect Kindle Press editors tended to publish based on content and marketability—in other words, using criteria much like their traditional publishing counterparts. The number of nominations a book received was never revealed to a winner so far as I know. (There’s a reason Scouts “nominated” books rather than “voted” for them. It was not a purely democratic process.) It seems to me the coveted Hot & Trending badge kept authors busy promoting their book during the 30-day campaign, doing the legwork a tech-shrewd publicist would normally perform.

And perhaps that was the best reason for an independent author to try Kindle Scout: Promotion. Putting sample chapters of your latest book on amazon.com before tens of thousands of potential readers is a fine way to generate pre-release buzz. The Kindle Scout platform was custom-built to kick-start ebook sales.

Alas, the good times hit a road bump in the first quarter of 2017. A change in editorial staff was announced via private channels to Kindle Press authors. Although not obvious at first, as the months wore on the pace of accepted manuscripts slowed to a trickle. The diversity I’d so admired also narrowed. A Kindle Press editor admitted to me earlier this year they were seeking work for the “Kindle Reader:” accessible fiction for an adult readership. Nothing wrong with that, merely unfortunate that Kindle Press couldn’t keep the door open for writers striking out on a different trail.

What’s next?

With Kindle Scout’s funky little experiment shuttered for good, I find myself strangely nostalgic. There really was something exhilarating about joining the experiment and seeing where it would take me. It strikes me that Amazon charted a map showing a new way of doing business in the publishing world. Kindle Scout’s formula could be replicated by an ambitious and web-savvy small publisher, or even an established house’s imprint seeking to shake things up. Yes, the book closes on Kindle Scout with the clearing of a throat. Let’s see if there’s a sequel.


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Ray Bradbury on getting stories published

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I’ve been dipping into Wayne L. Johnson’s 1980 book Ray Bradbury the past couple of months. It’s part of the Recognitions series published by Frederick Ungar, a series featuring critical work on genre writers who’ve transcended their genre.

Johnson’s Ray Bradbury is a biography of the author tracked through his output rather than a stiff-backed recounting of dates and locations of events in his life. Bradbury’s short stories are grouped by subject matter and style as a strategy for analyzing the author’s approach to fiction. Johnson’s book paints a picture of a man who delved deep in the human imagination and returned with some fantastic stories for the ages.

Ray Bradbury was one of the most prolific short story authors of the 20th century because he never abandoned the form, unlike other authors who move on from them to novel writing. Bradbury capitalized on his bounty by disguising his short story collections as longer work (The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man). Even Fahrenheit 451 is itself a maturation of a shorter work first published in Galaxy Magazine.

What caught my eye (and sparked the idea for this blog post) was a brief aside in Johnson’s introduction about how Bradbury was able to sell his prodigious output of short stories across the spectrum of American publishing:

Convinced that most editors were bored with seeing the same sort of material arriving day after day, Bradbury resolved to submit stories which, at least on the face of it, seemed inappropriate to the publication involved. Rather than send “Dandelion Wine” (later a chapter in the novel) to Collier’s or Mademoiselle, therefore, Bradbury sent it to Gourmet, which didn’t publish fiction. It was immediately accepted. “The Kilimanjaro Device” was snapped up by Life, which also didn’t publish fiction, after the story had been rejected by most of the big fiction magazines. … Bradbury insists that he places complete faith in his loves and intuitions to see him through.

Bradbury was certainly a known quantity when these short stories were published but, as Johnson indicates, he still faced his share of rejection slips. I don’t think Bradbury’s wanton submissions were ignorant of market conditions; it sounds to me he was quite savvy with this strategy. (Sending “Dandelion Wine” to Gourmet magazine is kind of genius, actually.) But Bradbury’s strategy transcends the usual mantra to “study the market.”

Galaxy Magazine (February 1951). Bradbury’s novella “The Fireman” was the nucleus for Fahrenheit 451.

I’ve been a front-line slush pile reader at a few literary magazines, and I can tell you Bradbury’s intuition is spot-on. When you’re cycling through a stack of manuscripts, they begin to look and read the same. Too many of those short stories were treading familiar paths. Too often they introduced characters awfully similar to the last story from the pile.

A story with some fresh air in it certainly would wake me from my slush-pile stupor. The magazine market has changed dramatically in the past ten years—and absolutely has reinvented itself since Bradbury was publishing “Dandelion Wine”—but I imagine similar dynamics are still in place in the 21st century. Surprise an editor with your story and you just might have a shot at publication.

And if you’re banging out short stories and fruitlessly submitting them one after another to the usual suspects, try taking a risk and following Bradbury’s lead. Trust me, if you can put on your next cover letter that your short fiction was published by Car & Driver or National Geographic, that will surprise editors too.


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Playwriting & screenwriting books every fiction writer should read

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Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun

When I discuss fiction with other writers, I often turn the conversation to playwriting and screenwriting. (My writing friends are kind of sick of the topic.) I talk about these other genres because I believe there’s much for a fiction writer to mine from them.

Plays and film are different narrative forms than a novel or a short story, and so not all their nuances translates well. However, like comics and graphic novels, I believe the similarities outweigh the differences. What’s more, the practitioners of these other narrative arts have approached them with different assumptions and focuses than fiction writers. Different perspectives on the same art is a great way to learn more.

What I respect about plays and film are their emphases on structure. Structure is woefully under-emphasized in creative writing programs. Far too many MFA students are exiting programs without a working definition of crucial fiction elements like plot and character under their belts. Playwriting exposed me to a world where narrative structure is not treated as a necessary evil but unapologetically the primary focus.

From stage plays I explored books on screenwriting for largely the same reason: to better understand narrative structure. Scripts, both stage and film, are not assortments of characters and setting and dialogue steeped in a genre bath. Scripts are structure. The same applies to fiction, from short stories to novels.

What follows are various texts I’ve read over the years that have influenced my thinking and writing.

Playwriting

Aristotle’s Poetics: Not the dry, dusty book you might think. Aristotle was a fan of stagecraft. His Poetics are an ancient fanboy’s attempt to understand why plays make us laugh and cry, why some plays “work” while others “fail.” If nothing else, read the Poetics for Aristotle’s definitions of plot, character, and spectacle. You will walk away understanding why Aristotle thinks story should be plot-driven and not character-driven—and it will drive your MFA friends nuts.

The Playwright’s Guidebook (Stuart Spencer): Spencer lays out the same elements as Aristotle but in terms more practical and less theoretical. Too often craft writers think “how-to-write” books are restrictive or push formulas with the ultimate intention of producing a blockbuster. Spencer’s more thoughtful approach breaks those expectations. If there’s one lesson to take away from Spencer, it is understanding the backbone of all playwriting, the beat, as the fundamental unit of drama (action, conflict, and event). Beats drive fiction too.

Danny and the Deep Blue Sea (John Patrick Shanley): A play in two acts featuring a pair of characters who are alternately in each other’s arms and at each other’s throats. Shanley’s humanist play is a model of economy and character-building. Fiction writers should look to Danny for its effective dialogue, the use of ambiguity, and creating characters through the steady accretion of detail—the naturalism of two highly protective people revealing their soft underbellies to each other.

A Raisin in the Sun (Lorraine Hansberry) and Fences (August Wilson): It’s difficult for me to pick one over the other, so I list both. In some ways, each play is constructed in a by-the-book manner: Each act built of scenes, each scene made of beats, and all beats and all scenes propelling their characters forward. You can put your finger on a random page of either of these plays and discover all the elements of Great American Playwriting in action. This is why I’ve written on both plays before (here, here, and here).

Film & Television

Adventures in the Screen Trade (William Goldman): Although much of this breezy book regards the insanity that is the movie business, Goldman spends valuable pages discussing the creative decisions he made penning screenplays for such classics as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President’s Men, as well as lesser-known films like Harper and A Bridge Too Far. Most instructive is Goldman including a short story of his own and the script he developed based on it. Goldman is an accomplished novelist (he wrote The Princess Bride!) and his insights into screenwriting often “sound” like they’re coming from a fiction writer. Plus, let’s face it—reading the inside scoop behind these great 1970s films is a treat for any movie buff.

Screenplay and/or The Screenwriter’s Handbook (Syd Field): The former is “the Bible of screenwriting” and the second is the New Testament. Yes, both books focus heavily on film script specifics, but Field’s discussion of narrative structure made me re-think how the novel is constructed, so much that I’m working on a series about it.

Unlike plays, I can’t recommend hunkering down and reading any particular movie script. That may sound strange since I’m recommending books on writing them. Film scripts are so concerned with camera work, it often hampers getting to the meat of the script fiction writers should be concerned with—dialogue, conflict, scene structure, and so on.

Often it’s instructive to read plays adapted into movies, especially if the films are loyal to the source text. A good example of this is Glengarry Glen Ross, which easily features the best cast ever assembled for the play. (Trust me, I’ve seen a few productions.)

Consider watching a film as a writer instead of an audience member. Keep the remote handy so you can go back and re-watch key scenes and study their dialogue and construction. Go even further and watch a film scene with your computer open so you can transcribe the dialogue. That may sound nutty, but you will really come to appreciate the use of language in film—and your own dialogue will improve for it. Good screenwriters have a knack for naturalistic dialogue. Great screenwriters know how to build taut scenes with no dialogue at all—study No Country for Old Men for good examples.

For scripts more dialogue-heavy and less involved with the camera, look to television scripts, in particular those set before a live audience. They tend to focus on characters with well-defined motivations and situations with explosive conflict. (An old theater saying that applies to any great performance: “When someone walks on stage, it better be trouble.” Take that to heart in your fiction as well.) Unlike plays, television scripts are harder to locate. A used bookstore with a well-stocked Film & Television section may be your friend here.

Fawlty Towers: John Cleese and Connie Booth’s sitcom regularly tops British polls as the funniest show ever, and for good reasons. While the comic acting is one-of-a-kind, the show’s writing is also superb. The first episode and “The Hotel Inspector” are heavy on wordplay and farce, with each character popping to life the moment they enter and utter their first line.


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Blood in the margins

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Previously I wrote glowingly on Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud. While I gushed how thoroughly McCloud dissects the language of comics, I didn’t spend much time (if any) on how Understanding Comics has affected me as a fiction writer.

Rather than expand my review to, oh, 10,000 words or so, I’ve broken up lessons I’ve drawn from Understanding Comics into separate posts. Most of these posts will deal with narrative structure in fiction, so they might be viewed as a supplement to the series I’ve been developing on fiction treatments and outlines.

Gutters & paragraphs

I write fiction: novels, short stories, the occasional novella. My chosen art form is pure text: letters to words, words to sentences, sentences to paragraphs, paragraphs to chapters.

Scott McCloud’s chosen art form synthesizes images and written language into panels and panels into pages—comics. (Most people forget comics deal with text as well as images, another reason he calls comics “the invisible art.”) Word balloons, descriptive headers, even Batman’s BLAMMO!! coordinate with pictures in cell-like frames.

This doesn’t seem terribly applicable to writing fiction. What lessons can a fiction writer possibly glean from Understanding Comics?

Comics are a sequential art. Their “motion” depends on the layout of images across a page and the order with which they’re consumed by the reader. This is not so different than a story or a novel, only that they are built with a single component, words. But like comics, that single component is laid out sequentially, with words grouped into sentences and paragraphs. It may seem like a stretch, but I say these groupings act as narrative “panels.”

If you look back at my last post, you’ll notice McCloud identified written language as the ultimate pictograph in his “Picture Plane” diagram. By his reckoning, fiction is like a comic book with all the imagery stripped out. In comics, image and language spin together like dancers on a dance floor. In fiction, language is a solo act. Words are delegated to do all the heavy lifting.

Also like comics, fiction has a narrative “clock” which may be slowed down or sped up panel-by-panel, sentence-by-sentence:

   Mary set down the phone with a sigh. “Hopefully that’s the last I’ll hear of Bob Wilkins.”
   Ten years later, while searching through a stack of oily newspapers tied and bound for recycling, Bob Wilkins discovered…

Probably the most-quoted section from McCloud’s book is the chapter “Blood in the Gutter.” Gutters are the blank space between panels (although some people question if even a space is required). For proof of McCloud’s obsession with the language of comics, look no further than his exhaustive dissection of the role of gutters in comics—the role of blank space in telling a story.

The blood in the gutter flows between seeing the axe-murderer bearing down on his victim in the left panel and “hearing” the scream across the night sky in the right panel. This closure occurs in comics as well as fiction (and in most other narrative arts too, such as film). McCloud reminds us, visually and lucidly, that narrative is a participatory act. No reader? No story, then, only ink on the page.

Closure in fiction is as complicated as it is in comics, and I can’t possibly cover all its facets here. One type of closure comics and fiction share is the use of white space (“empty space”). Take the above fiction example and add an asterisk:

   Mary set down the phone with a sigh. “Hopefully that’s the last I’ll hear of Bob Wilkins.”
*
   Ten years later, while searching through a stack of oily newspapers tied and bound for recycling, Bob Wilkins discovered…

Even though the only change between these two examples is the asterisk centered on the line, it “feels” like more time has passed in the second example.

Different publishers use different devices to mark section breaks, such as three asterisks across the page, a short line or curlicue, or no print signal at all other than extra blank space separating the two text blocks. Often the first paragraph of the new section is not indented or has some other print feature to distinguish it, such as using small caps for the first three words.

Chapter openings and other similar breaks in the story will usually employ a variation of the above. Unfortunately, my blog’s layout isn’t conducive to demonstrating these different print styles. If you’re unfamiliar with them, pick up a books from different publishers and check closely how their layout editor arranged their chapters and section breaks.

White space can indicate the passing of a span of time—but it may also indicate a shift in space:

   Mary set down the phone with a sigh. “Hopefully that’s the last I’ll hear of Bob Wilkins.”
*
   Ten miles away, while searching through a stack of oily newspapers tied and bound for recycling, Bob Wilkins discovered…

Here the asterisk indicates a change of location, leaving the reader to search out other clues to determine how much time, if any, has passed between Mary hanging up the phone and Bob sifting through the recycling. The blatant cues I’ve added here (“ten years later,” “ten miles away”) are meant to assist my examples. A more artful author could indicate the same shifts with other, more subtle textual clues.

So asterisks, line breaks, and white space can indicate changes in time and space. What other visual signals does the fiction writer have at his or her disposal?

Look at paragraphs. Paragraphs employ white space (a new line, often a leading indent) to indicate all manner of changes in fiction:

  • time
  • location
  • point-of-view
  • shift of tone and subject matter
  • change of speaker (as with dialogue)

There’s plenty of other possibilities too. And don’t think breaking up paragraphs is some mechanical rule-based process out of the creator’s control. It’s a grammarian fantasy that hard-and-fast rules exist for making paragraphs. In fiction, breaking prose into paragraphs is a somewhat subjective art. After a century of modernist and postmodernist experimentation, it’s only become more subjective. Packing paragraphs with shifting sentences is considered avant garde in some situations. Run-on sentences packed into a single paragraph are now acceptable as well. (Read the first chapter of Billy Bathgate for an example.)

If you think about it, chapters are an even more extreme form of visual signaling. Chapter breaks are miniature explosions in the novel’s stream-of-narration. Chapters give the writer a chance to make major shifts and signal big changes occurring, to take a deep breath before moving on with the tale. (Chapter breaks also give the reader a chance to bookmark and set aside the book. Every chapter the writer introduces is one more risk of losing their audience.)

Even the format of chapter breaks sends signals to the reader. Some books use numbered words (“Twelve”) and others numerals (“12”). Some books start each chapter on a new page while others do not. (I’ve noticed Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer books often fail to start chapters on new pages, contributing to the detective’s relentless pace. Alex Garland’s superb The Beach is also laid out like this, another novel with a unremitting narrator.)

Children books are notorious for chapter titles (“At the Old Sawmill”). Other books merely indicate chapters with—you guessed it—exaggerated white space at the top of the page. Even the numbering of chapters may play a significant role in the telling of a story. Chapters (and page numbers!) are numbered backwards in Chuck Palahniuk’s Survivor, while the chapter numbers in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time form a sequence of prime numbers because the narrator finds them pleasing.

I’ve read enough books to know a chapter’s blank space (or lack of it) and the format of chapter titles plays a role, no matter how minor, in my reception of the book. If narration is a participatory act, and if you’re the kind of writer who believes every detail matters (and I think you should be that writer), then pay attention to how you employ blank space.

One temptation at this point is to suggest these white space markers are not so diverse after all—aren’t asterisks and line breaks and chapters merely for scene changes, separating the story’s structure in a less-blatant way than stage plays are marked (“Act IV Scene 2”)?

Not really. For example, a chapter may end on a cliffhanger and the next chapter pick up immediately where the last left off: same scene, same characters, same time and place. I’ve seen book chapters end with a line of dialogue and the next chapter open with another character’s reply. Writers often use chapter breaks to highlight the importance of that moment in the narrative, but they’re not a scene break per se.

This is what I mean when I say you, the writer, should pay close attention to your use of blank space. When you insert blank space in your next story—a scene ending with a second break, or starting a new chapter—ask yourself what your story gains (or, what your story loses) with the blank you’ve added.

It strikes me as fashionable these days for writers to break apart short stories into quick, MTV-like section breaks. Often each section builds a little emotion, heightens some tension, then drops off and shifts to a new scene. Try writing a short story told in one uncut narration. Try writing a short story told in one uncut scene. Try writing a short story in one paragraph.

Likewise, if you’re working on a novel. question each chapter break. Should these two sequential chapters be “glued” together? Or perhaps the first chapter should conclude earlier, or the second chapter start later?

I have a bad habit of starting a chapter in media res, that is, in the middle of the action, and a couple of paragraphs in, jump to a flashback explaining how the characters wound up in this action. Most times this indicates a poor choice of where I started the chapter. Some times I drop the flashback entirely and it’s not a problem at all. The flashback added little, and removing it only strengthened the chapter as a whole.

But the exercise itself is a questioning of blank space in my fiction. What purpose does this particular use of blank space serve? Does it add or subtract from the story?

For a real-world example of empty space in fiction, here’s a selection from Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me. Look how Thompson uses fictive closure to avoid the censor’s red pencil in 1952:

I jerked the jersey up over her face and tied the end in a knot. I threw her down on the bed, yanked off her sleeping shorts and tied her feet together with them.

I took off my belt and raised it over my head. …

I don’t know how long it was before I stopped, before I came to my senses.

(Those ellipses are in the original.) Welcome to fiction’s version of “blood in the gutter”—a craven act of violence committed by three periods in sequence and the white space between the paragraphs.

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The New American Regionalism

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Detective (hans van den berg, CC BY 2.0)

An untested opinion I’ve held for many years:

Modern mystery fiction has supplanted 19th-century American regional literature, sometimes known as “writing of local color,” as its dominant form.

Regionalism is most strongly associated with Southern writers like Kate Chopin and Joel Chandler Harris, but after the American Civil War local color writing sprung up all over the country. Charlotte Perkins Gilman (“The Yellow Wallpaper”) cataloged New England’s parochialism while Bret Harte wrote roaring tales of California’s Gold Rush. Scholars make distinctions between the terms “regional literature” and “writing of local color,” but I’ll use them interchangeably here.

Regionalism in American writing faded after the turn of the century to be replaced by a more consensus-based literature. Perhaps the twin rise of mass literacy and mass media contributed to regionalism’s fade, although it did not go extinct. Faulkner and Jean Toomer wrote well into the 20th century, and wrote using techniques that would have been foreign to the earlier regional writers, but their fiction is unmistakably grounded in regionalism.

But did regionalism truly fade away? Or was it replaced by something else?

It seems to me that mystery fiction quietly—almost subversively—filled in regionalism’s absence. Every major city in America is host to at least one major crime or detective writer, from Seattle (Aaron Elkins, G. M. Ford) to Boston (Robert Parker, Dennis Lehane) to Chicago (Sara Paretsky) to New Orleans (James Lee Burke), all representing their respective locales through their work. Name almost any place in America today and you’ll find crime writers prowling its dark corners. In the process, they’re introducing the region’s colors and textures to a national audience.

More than any other form of fiction today, mystery is concerned with setting. Science fiction has almost no restrictions when it comes to setting. Fantasy explicitly takes place elsewhere than the here and now, otherwise it’s not fantasy. Romance fiction has setting too, but its concerns are before the fireplace and in the bedroom.

Even contemporary American literature—”fiction of literary intent,” so-called hard realism—is not as connected to setting as mystery fiction. Too often stories from the small literary magazines feel as though they could take place in any city or suburb or small farm, whichever backdrop suits the characters and the emotional arcs they traverse.

Perhaps the only other form of American fiction so tied to setting is the Western, a genre that not coincidentally shares a great deal in common with the American mystery, especially the private eye genre.

I’m not saying other forms of fiction don’t possess a setting, or that they don’t concern themselves with setting. I’m saying that, for the form as a whole, mystery adopts a priority for regions—regionalism—other forms do not.

In mystery, scenes unfold on streets with grounded names and in bars with a history. A great mystery reads like a travelogue of a town, a neighborhood, or a county. The American mystery has a tradition of hewing to real-world settings, such as the streets of Nob Hill in Hammett’s stories and novels. Ed McBain’s “87th Precinct” police procedurals take place in a fictional New York City borough, but it’s the Big Apple all the same. Sue Grafton’s stand-in for Santa Barbara (“Santa Teresa”) is so Southern California, you can imagine The Eagles cutting a single about it.

This, I say, is the New American Regionalism. Mystery writers delight in bringing alive their surroundings, and by doing so they share their surroundings with their readership. Local color means local characters and local charm. Look at what stylist Elmore Leonard does so expertly in his Florida novels, capturing all the facets of dialects and cultures in Miami. The Encyclopedia Britannica’s entry of local color emphasizes “the features and peculiarities of a particular locality and its inhabitants.” This fits Florida crime writing to a T, with an emphasis on the peculiarities and particulars of the genre’s always-colorful cast of characters (Leonard, Carl Hiassen, Edna Buchanan).

My first inkling of the connection between regional writing and mysteries came to me twenty-five years ago living in San Luis Obispo, California. An ever-reliable bookstore there stocked a case of local writers, including several mystery series. Perusing the back cover blurbs, it was apparent the writers had mined the peculiarities and particulars of San Luis Obispo County for all it had to offer. My cynical younger self found it ludicrous, these over-boiled private eyes and steely Lt. Detectives walking the mean streets of San Luis Obispo, a place ranked “one of the happiest cities on Earth.”

Over the years I’ve lightened up. I came to realize the mystery writers of SLO Town were merely doing what all regional writers have done in America: Explore, critique, and celebrate they places they live.


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Externalizing inspiration

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Last time I wrote about keeping a writing notebook. Let’s say you started one, or have been keeping a notebook for some time. What do you do with it? Once you’ve filled a notebook with all these ideas, how do you transfer that inspiration to a short story or novel?

From an essay I wrote for North American Review regarding a short story of mine, I discussed how I used a writing notebook:

On occasion I revisit my writing notebooks for inspiration…Many of my stories evolve from my own (sometimes misplaced) attempts to wire two or three bits of disparate inspiration together and see if sparks fly.

The inspiration for the story they published (“The Obituarist”) came from three lines scribbled into my notebook years ago:

“The Obituarist – Dying, old age, writes obits for living ppl. Also writes fiction—short stories?—and has come to realize that man is reliant on conflict, tension, etc. because all our stories rely on them, and they are not stories otherwise. Speaking to a young person writing his obit. (Or he writes book reviews.)”

That was it. I had a title alright, and some idea of a character and his situation, but nothing further. As I explained for NAR, about a year after writing this in my notebook I began working on the story itself, which is now collected in A Concordance of One’s Life.

This is the true value of a free-form writing notebook. For some people, a writing notebook is to prevent forgetting something. For others, a notebook is a journal, a way to talk to one’s self, a method of getting down pent-up emotions, ideas, or even a fleeting notion that may or may not be useful later.

I keep a writing notebook to externalize my thoughts. Externalizing inspiration, no matter how crazy or random the inspiration may seem, is itself an act of creation. Writing an idea in a notebook is as important as sitting down before the computer and formally typing the story. Those erratic sentences I scribbled about the obituarist were not subsidiary or tangential to writing the story. Those words were the genesis. The story started with me scratching those erratic lines into my notebook, not a year later when I typed the opening sentence in my word processor.

By committing some scattered notions to the page, I’m getting them out of my skull—where they’re fluid, malleable, and insubstantial—and forcing them into the physical world, where they take shape and harden into form. It’s important to judge my ideas objectively in the bald daylight to determine if they’re worth expanding upon.

Plenty of my inspirations go no further than the notebook. That’s not a bad thing. Most do not age well. When I return to my notebook, I often blanch upon reading these old inspirations. I will hurry to turn the page—a sure indication I made the best decision not to pursue them.

Wiring sources of inspiration together

A Concordance of One's Life by Jim Nelson

In my NAR essay, I wrote that “The Obituarist” grew from a single idea. More often I find success in combining ideas, “to wire two or three bits of disparate inspiration together and see if sparks fly.”

I hold a pet theory that true inspiration is rarely, if ever, a single atomic idea. Inspiration is more often multiple ideas coalescing into one. These balls of inspiration accrete mass over time until a tipping point is reached, and the creator feels the urgent need to get the accumulation down on the page in the form of a story. (Or on the canvas, or modeled in clay, and so on.)

For an example of wiring disparate bits of inspiration together, I point to another story in the collection, “A Concordance of One’s Life.” The elements from my notebook contributing to the story include:

  1. Man writes a concordance of his own memoirs (but why?)
  2. Adult feels cheated about something that happened when he was young
  3. Small town becomes a literary tourist attraction (a la Hemingway’s house in Key West)
  4. A man with a name no one can pronounce

When I began writing “Concordance”, the early drafts only involved points 1 and 2. I thought pairing them answered that first question (“but why?”). I was wrong; the early drafts of the story went nowhere. I’d noted the second two bits of inspiration in my notebook before starting the first draft but failed to make a connection. I thought they were for a separate story, if I used them at all.

In a later draft, I added the third inspiration and sparks began to fire. The quiet mountain town as a tourist attraction added a quirky backdrop to my drafts, odd scenes of faceless people going from location to location with their well-worn concordances in hand. Still, the story was shiftless and moody and failed to progress.

The final bit of inspiration came from waking one Saturday morning and, hazy-headed, realizing the cheated man was not the concordance’s author. Rather, the narrator was a friend or an acquaintance who went unmentioned in the concordance (even though everyone else in town is described within it).

I’d given up on the story several times over a span of nearly two years. Patience and focus on the story’s needs led to plenty of sparks that Saturday morning. The draft I wrote became more-or-less what was published by Watchword later that year.

(Somewhere in this is a moral about not giving up on stories, but I must confess it’s sometimes good to cut anchor and move on. Some stories simply cannot be salvaged.)

The fourth point on inspiration—”man with a name no one can pronounce”—found its way into the story during the Saturday morning writing session. It was a last-minute addition. I’d been thinking about the man with the unpronounceable name as the basis for another story, but it had no feet. At the computer Saturday morning, I included it as a gag, a side bit of detail. As the story came to fruition, I realized it was one of the most salient aspects of “A Concordance of One’s Life.”


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Making the most of your writing notebook

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Pablo Picasso – Tête d’Homme (1969) (CC BY 2.0)

You keep a writing notebook, right?

Years ago I attended an exhibition of Picasso’s sketch pads and notebooks. People thronged the museum fascinated with the charcoal and pencil scratchings of a 20th century oil painting master. Most of the sketches were loose, ad hoc, even sloppy. None of Picasso’s originals were on display, only his sketches.

What drives my fascination with the exhibit are not the sketches themselves. As artifacts, yes, they were captivating. (Imagine page upon page of the best doodles you ever saw.) What was more fascinating was their role as the connective tissue between Picasso’s imagination and the masterpieces he produced over a lifetime.

We have no analogue in the world of fiction. Perhaps Hemingway’s or Henry James’ notebooks are studied by literature students, but I can’t imagine the notebooks of even the most famous writers drawing the attention of Picasso’s (although some of those writing notebooks are not forgotten).

Don’t keep a writing notebook for posterity. Don’t expect anyone but yourself to read it. But if you have any interest in creative writing, I recommend keeping a notebook. If it was good enough for Picasso—and Hemingway, and Henry James—it’s good enough for you.

Not an organizer

Let’s get this out of the way: A writing notebook is not an organizer. Keep your to-do lists somewhere else.

I actually have two notebooks, one for inspiration and ideas, the second to organize the nuts-and-bolts of my writing: Reminders to produce treatments, send query letters, and so forth. For this more business-like organizer, I follow a simplified version of the Bullet Journal approach, which has served me well for years now.

You’ll be tempted to keep your organizer and writing notebook in the same physical book. I caution against it. An organizer is exactly that, a place of constraint, rigidity, and order. (In other words, it’s to get things done.) A writing notebook needs to be a free-form place. It’s for random ideas, bits of dialogue, strange notions, bits of fleeting language disconnected from anything rational. A writing notebook can even hold drawings, things like maps or bizarre flora & fauna.

I separate my organizer from my writing notebook for a reason. If I combine them, they’ll blend, and I’ll find myself attempting to organize my creative notions. And, likewise, the free-flowing pages will make it more difficult to find the organized lists.

I’ve inhabited a number of different writing notebooks over the years. I once went through a series of the ever-trendy Moleskines, pocket-sized and hardbound with their handy elastic band to keep the book shut. Most memorable is their twee “As a reward: $______” on the inside cover, allowing the owner a chance to estimate the dollar value of their own musings.

There exists numerous Moleskine knock-offs that are fine for the job. I’ve gone through several brands and can’t recommend any one. To mix things up, I’ve tried other notebook form factors as well. I once experimented with a high school composition notebook, thinking the different size might yield unexpected fruit. (It did, but not in the way I was expecting—which was the entire point.)

Don’t get locked into one writing notebook manufacturer or model. Different paper weight, rule widths, dimensions, and bindings will subtly produce variation in the words you pour across the pages. The same goes for ink and pen types. The only variants I’ve not explored are graph paper (which I fear will introduce too much inflexibility) and unlined paper, which sounds like pure chaos for this writer, a man who barely read his own cursive.

As far as organization, I go minimal with my writing notebook. If I have a story or novel in mind, I’ll write my working title at the top of a fresh page, add the date for my own reference, and start writing. (I usually have at least one title in mind when I reach for my notebook, even if doesn’t survive to the first draft.)

If the idea is a random thought not associated with a story, I’ll give it its own page with the most simplest or basic of titles at the top of the page, only to separate it out from the other work I’m developing.

Even if my idea is merely one or two sentences, I’ll usually give it it’s own page. Don’t fear mostly-empty pages. There’s no reason to be aggressively economical with page use. That’s about as far as I go with organization.

I also don’t worry about being orderly with my entries. For example, I have a novella side-project at the moment. When I longhand narration into my notebook I don’t concern myself with entering the new prose in chapter order. I also don’t worry if what I’m writing follows anything else I’ve written in the preceding pages, or even if I will use it at all in the final work. If I’m inspired to write, I write.

Giving myself the freedom to write whatever I want whenever I want to is important. Artificial barriers such as “I can’t write this until I’ve finished that” merely give me a reason not to write at all, the biggest threat for any writer.

I try to ensure I have my notebook on me whenever I’ll be in a place when I can allow my thoughts to wander and explore. No, I don’t carry it with me at all times. (I don’t even carry my smartphone with me at all times.) If it makes sense for you to keep it on you at all times, do it—but don’t forget to carry a pen as well. One without the other is all-but-worthless.

My writing notebook is also not merely for writing prose. For example, when working on a novel I might have a page or two dedicated entirely to listing the names of the book’s characters. This allows me to swiftly look up a name if it slips my mind while writing chapters. For Bridge Daughter, I had pages of medical terminology, real and fictional, as the novel employed quite a bit of it and I wanted to ensure consistency.

I don’t produce a table of contents or an index for my notebooks (such as how the Bullet Journal system advocates). When I’m entering prose in the computer, I trust myself to recall what I’ve written in my notebooks and dig it out on-demand. (This sometimes means having two notebooks handy when I’m typing, as my ideas for the book may span more than one notebook.)

Nothing is wasted

Returning to Picasso’s notebooks, another impressive aspect was their sheer volume. He produced tons of work he never intended to show or sell. His sketchbooks were for him, not us, and were a means to an end.

I’ve heard of and witnessed writers being stingy with their output. They view five pages of prose in their notebook never being published—or even making it into a working draft—as a “waste.”

Nothing is wasted. All writing is practice for the next round of writing. If you view every word in your writing notebook as precious and must be conserved the way crude oil or drinking water must be conserved, you’re doomed.

Like Picasso, view your writing notebook as a place to be sloppy and free, a place to expend language wantonly. Be verbose, be chatty. Don’t worry about passive voice or tense changes.

I save all my old writing notebooks (for nostalgia, I suppose), but I don’t obsessively mine them for ideas, thinking each little scrap of language or inspiration must be utilized. My notebooks brim with imaginative dead-ends. I’m fine with that. I’d rather my ideas rot in my notebook, off the vine as it were, rather than go to waste on the vine—lost as fleeting thoughts in my head.


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