Writing Crime Fiction—10 Years Later
By Guest | February 21, 2016 |
Our guest today is Libby Fischer Hellmann who thirty-five years ago left a career in broadcast news in Washington, DC, and moved to Chicago, where she, naturally, began to write gritty crime fiction. Twelve novels and twenty short stories later, she claims they’ll take her out of the Windy City feet first. She has been nominated for many awards in the mystery and crime writing community and has even won a few. Her latest novel Jump Cut—see the book trailer on Youtube—can be pre-ordered at Amazon, for Kobo and iBooks, and at Barnes&Noble.
The “new” publishing world has changed much of what we writers do or expect in promotion, distribution, and editorial guidance. Recently I became aware of how much it’s actually changed the way we write. This blog captures my thoughts on the matter.
Connect with Libby on her blog, on Facebook, and on Twitter.
Writing Crime Fiction—10 Years Later
Some say the whole world is ADD today. I think it started—or blossomed—with hyperlinks. When I’m reading an article online, I’m often distracted by the hyperlink and click on it for verification or amplification. That has resulted in what could be called “Distracted Reading.”
Like distracted driving, it’s a problem. Our brains can only concentrate on one thing at a time, and our attention spans just can’t keep up. The Pew Research Center agrees. In a recent survey of almost 2,500 teachers, 87% felt modern technologies were creating an “easily distracted generation with short attention spans.” And a 2012 article in the Australian Financial quotes neuroscientists who say that technology is affecting our brains, our feelings, and our self-image, sometimes in negative ways.
That has infected novel reading as well. True confession: as a reader, I used to give an author fifty pages to capture my interest. Then it went down to twenty. Today it’s only a few pages before I’m off to the next “bright and shiny” object, er—book.
It’s no surprise that changes in reading habits have affected the book market and marketing. For example, until recently, Amazon “rewarded” shorter works via their Kindle Unlimited program, which paid authors when a mere ten percent of their book was read. That led some authors to produce very short books so that the ten percent minimum was met by just a few pages. While that’s now been addressed (at least for the moment) by Amazon’s new Pages-Read system, the paradigm has inevitably led to changes in writing fiction itself. At least for me. The way I wrote my thirteenth novel was substantially different than the way I wrote my previous twelve.
Shorter Chapters
For one thing, I’m writing shorter chapters. That means “James Patterson short.” I used to include at least two scenes in each chapter. No more. Now it’s one scene per chapter, and based on the reviews and honors on Nobody’s Child, which was the first time I tried it, short was a good move. For some reason the shorter the chapter, the deeper the suspense. Readers told me they couldn’t read just one. They HAD to keep reading. So thanks, Mr. Patterson.
Shorter Length, Fewer Subplots
The length of the novels I write has been pared down as well. My new thriller is the shortest novel I’ve written, clocking in at about 70,000 words. Previously, my novels were 90-100K words each. Part of that has to do with subplots. I used to have a subplot in every novel, but I didn’t include one in the new one. Partly that was because of the complexity of the main plot, but part of it was by design. I wanted the book to move.
Condensed Narrative
I’m becoming stingier with my narrative too. Whether I’m describing a setting, a character, or an action, I try to keep it at about three or four concise sentences. However, the flip side is that the last sentence must somehow elevate the description so it says more than a reader expects. One of the best examples I can recall is from Raymond Chandler. It clearly isn’t new, and it’s actually five sentences, but in these days of “less is more,” you’ll get the point. This is taken from one of Chandler’s short stories, “Red Wind.”
There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.
Novellas
I’m also writing more novellas these days. My readers seem to love them, and I enjoy writing them. Writing a 30,000 word story doesn’t seem as daunting as a full novel, and I find I can say pretty much the same thing as I would in a novel but more concisely.
The Biggest Change
The biggest change has come in detective tradecraft, where the technology of “detecting” has advanced almost beyond recognition. Of course, rapid-pace changes in policing have been happening since the Internet and cell phones arrived, longer than a decade ago. I remember how everyone was concerned when cell phones became ubiquitous, with the fear they would change detective novels. They have. But, happily, cell phones cause their own complications, like bad connections, lost calls, phones out of juice. More recently, crazy complex password protection, and burner phones cause their own obstacles. All of these make crime thrillers more modern and suspenseful.
Hacking has also caused widespread changes in crime-fighting tradecraft. Ten years ago, hacking existed, but it was nowhere as sophisticated and pervasive as it is now. In fact, it’s an industry. I couldn’t have told you what an ethical hacker was ten years ago. Today, there are hundreds of them, dedicated to finding hackers and evaluating the file encryption systems corporations use.
The ability to ferret out information has exploded, too. For example, work that used to take a full day or more can now be done in minutes. Who owns a specific piece of property or car… when taxes were last paid… background checks … all of that is available to the average citizen through public records that are now digitized. In most cases, writers have access to the same—or similar—information as law enforcement.
All this means we crime writers have to be tech-savvy and accurate. I can’t write about things I don’t know– so my research takes more time. I don’t mind. I love doing research. At the same time, I live in fear that someone will throw my book across the room with a comment like, “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”
Still, the opportunity to write stories that readers respond to is a privilege, no matter what the style or format. So while my writing, and perhaps yours as well, has evolved and changed, my plots and characters haven’t. Hopefully the characters are still authentic and relatable, and the plotting credible. But readers are always the ultimate judge of that, aren’t they?
Has your writing changed in the past ten years? If so, how?
Many thanks to today’s guest.
You can read more WU guest posts by visiting this link.
Interesting. I hadn’t really thought about this.
Thanks for an intriguing and informative post. I was particularly interested in how you’ve chosen to pare things down, and are finding that it seems to be a winning strategy for you.
It’s funny: when it comes to Patterson, most writers find things about him to criticize (something I’m sometimes guilty of myself). But with his astonishing success rate, it makes sense to try to take a lesson or two from what he’s doing. Well done!
My personal favorite Jim Patterson story:
He spoke at Men of Mystery in Orange County, CA. He said something both Eddie Muller and I took note of, in a very positive way:
“I became a writer when I stopped writing sentences and started writing stories.”
I think that’s something every writer should take to heart.
Then I picked up one of his books. After about two pages, I said to myself: “Boy, he really did stop writing sentences.”
Thanks, Keith. I’m not generally a Patterson fan either, but, hey — it works! I can’t tell you how many people have commented on how much more “suspenseful” my books are these days. :)
And thanks, Writers Unboxed, for giving me this opportunity. Happy to get into a raging discussion about Patterson, short chapters, narrative, or anything else.
I love this writer’s blog! Libby’ s post is right on. Her latest was fast-paced and the idea of no sub -plots made it riveting. and concise. Great article which I ‘ll share with all my writing friends. We can learn so much from you professional writers such as Libby, Erika Robuck and so many others. I love the mix of genres on Writer Un -boxed!
Spot on! I think the recent changes in the way people do their jobs and live their lives has had ramifications for every writer. Not only do readers read differently, but characters must think and communicate differently, especially if they’re in highly technical fields like forensics and/or they’re Millennials. Sometimes when I watch television, I think the characters’ smartphones deserve top billing in the credits–they deliver all of the important lines!
In some genres, if you write “old,” readers will jump all over you. If an amateur librarian-sleuth goes to the bookshelf and picks up an encyclopedia to check a fact, reviewers write, “You expect me to to believe a librarian in this decade wouldn’t know how to Google?” If a YA protagonist gets lost in a new town, they say, “Hellooo, Siri anyone?”
When one college-aged critique partner read my last manuscript, she commented on the first page that she was confused about the heroine’s age, because even though she was supposedly 25, she used a battered old flip phone. The CP said this was unrealistic because nobody has a “dumb phone” anymore, and I should talk to more young people so I know what they’re like.
My age at the time? 26. I had a flip phone…and still do.
I’d LOVE to still have a flip phone. Internet info is notoriously unreliable and needs to be back-checked religiously. And we have Google maps on our phones and a GPS in the car and we still get lost all the time.
Not all readers are wise readers. And everybody has an opinion. We’ve all had our one-star reviews, sometimes laughably incoherent or illiterate. But also, sometimes, on point.
Joe Chaikin in THE PRESENCE OF THE ACTOR says the only thing you can do with criticism is read both the negative and the positive for what you consider useful, then leave it behind.
The funny thing is that now some of those problems might not be. I mean, when cell phones were fairly new it made sense to describe them in a story. Now, unless it’s somehow pertinent to the story or character, why describe the phone? In fact, just saying “cell phone” feels a bit dated — just mention the character’s phone … and let the reader fill in what that might be. Plus, that has the advantage of possibly not going out of date quite so fast.
Libby! How the hell are ya? (Note to Unboxers: Libby and I are not just partners in crime fiction, we also know each other well and, dare I say it, are friends.)
Although I agree it is an ADD world — I see it in myself as well — I’m not sure hyperlinks are to blame. I’m one of those nerds who routinely checks footnotes and endnotes as I read, with a bookmark in the back so I can access endnotes easily. Often the rubber really meets the road in those little suckers, because you can check the author’s sources, or see the various caveats and equivocations the writer isn’t admitting on the main page, etc.
I also come from a math background, where every sentence in a proof is so dense with information I often had to stop, draw a picture, test the statement in my own mind, etc., before proceeding.
This actually requires greater focus as you read. (I’m a much slower reader than I was as a kid, largely because of studying math (and reading poetry). I read every word for nuance, etc., which is why Jim Patterson doesn’t work for me. No nuance. Flat prose. Cliched plots. Stick-figure characters, etc. I think James Lee Burke, Michael Connelly, Denise Mina, Cornelia Read — and you, Libby — plus so many many more writers in the genre serve both story and language.)
But I agree we’re very ADD, and I tend to blame not just the Internet but the invention Lee Child said changed everything in his TV writing career: the remote control.
Once people could easily “switch stations” the way they could do with their car radios, storytelling changed. You had to keep the audience gripped minute-by-minute. Go back and watch an episode of Gunsmoke or Naked City and see if you don’t get twitchy because it feels so slow.
We now live in a world where information is not only coming at us at lightning speed, it’s coming from all directions. And many of those directions can be accessed instantly.
I find this in my own impulses. I’m much more mindful now of how insanely often I want to check email, or Facebook, because it’s so much easier and instantly gratifying than continuing to plow through my work.
But that only emphasizes the truth of the saying that the two things every writer needs are discipline and deadlines.
I too write shorter paragraphs and chapters now, often splitting them in half or thirds or more if they seem too long, and I agree it seems to create more momentum. (Don Winslow advises to check your pages for white space — too little means you’re writing too densely and readers will skip those pages. And we all know the Elmore Leonard advice: “Try not to write the parts people tend to skip.”)
And your note about keeping up with tech — who would have guessed even 10 years ago that writing fiction about the present would be as burdensome in terms of research as historical fiction?
Thanks for joining us here, Libby. Smart, insightful, eminently practical post. Hope to see you soon at one conference or another.
David–
About keeping up with tech: I was bad with it as a college teacher, and am worse with it now, as a retiree. The effect on my writing is that I apply what brain power I can muster, not in trying to keep up, but in devising stories that don’t require me to keep up. In The Anything Goes Girl, Brenda Contay travels to a place where mold and humidity destroy electronics (Micronesia). In Deep North, the antagonist destroys technology to isolate his victims. People forget phones, find themselves in a crisis just as a wind storm causes a power outage, or blows down a cell tower, etc. It’s also my aim to write stories in which emphasis on character and dialogue reduce the need to natter on about tech.
If I were to write something on all this, it could be called The Luddite’s Guidebook to Writing Fiction Now.
As for Patterson, we all know what he does, why he does it, and why what he does succeeds: In the age of cultural ADD, fewer and fewer readers have a clue as to what “literary values” are.
Great to hear from you, David. It’s been waaay too long. And yes, we are friends. And thank you for the compliment.
I love the Don Winslow tip about white space. But that begs a question… are we, in some ways, dumbing down our writing to conform to a new breed of readers who are either ADD, adrenaline junkies, or remote control Type-A’s? Maybe “dumbing down” is the wrong word… “Simplifying” perhaps?
Btw, I’m not excluding myself… I can’t read Dostoevsky the way I used to… same for other classical authors like Stendahl and Virginia Wolff.. even Dickens is a challenge sometimes. Or is it simply the times, they have a’ changed in terms of style?
I will confess to never being able to get beyond page 250 in a Doestoyevsky novel — despite being mesmerized and enthralled up to that point. For some reason at that point of each novel I just kinda lost the thread. Woolf has the advantage of writing books that are not overly long, but I think Austen has remained “modern” because her prose was a bit less experimental.
I literary writer who is eminently readable, with many of the same adaptations to the modern ADD mind you note in this post, is Julian Barnes, who is also one of the most cerebral. He’s also quite witty, and wit, as we all know, understands the worth of brevity. (I’d add Junot Diaz in that as well.)
Dickens has always been a briar patch for me (though I LOVE the David Lean films of the books). But Stendhal remains a hero. Why can I read him and not others? (Ditto Balzac.) Not sure.
Are we “dumbing down”? We are writing for the readers of our age, just as the older writers you identified did. We are only dumbing down if we also exclude nuanced thought and feeling. That’s my take, anyway.
Libby (and David)-
Great post. Interesting subject. Something I’ve definitely been thinking about.
But I’m gonna have to disagree (sorta) with you guys. Not today’s tech, and not the remote control. It’s life. Always has been.
Coming up in print journalism, I knew I had to grab a reader by the throat with the first sentence. Don’t always succeed, but it’s worth a shot. (And, btw, more than the remote … I still blame the newspaper fold.)
I may be the only one – and I know I am pretty contrarian – but I’ve been getting (as a reader) tired and annoyed by everyone using micro-chapters, even writers I really like. You can blame Patterson for the trend, but it’s only a trend if others follow. So in my WIP, I’m writing it with no chapters – 4 sections; no chapters, and no page breaks.
But then I like a challenge, so I think it’s fun trying to keep readers captivated without that one crutch (although I’m using plenty of others).
As for “dumbing down,” I think maybe it’s the opposite. Libby mentioned how little a writer can slide by readers any more. That doesn’t happen because they’re dumb.
Styles change, that’s mostly what the discussion is about. Hemingway changed it, and I think most of us wouldn’t want to go back to pre-Pappa style.
Maybe what’ll change style more is Kindle Unlimited paying writers only for what readers read — that’s novel. (And not necessarily in a good way.)
Libby–
I enjoyed your post, and thank you for it. Although I resent the success of James Patterson et al, it’s not because such writers have made it big and I haven’t, but because I have to assume their readers don’t know how easily they’re being manipulated, or don’t care.
You cast about for a euphemism for “dumbing down.” Why? 170 years ago, ordinary people stood in cornfields to hear Lincoln and Douglas debate for three hours. They understood complex arguments presented in terms of sophisticated sentences. Flash forward to the “debates” taking place on cable, with huge crowds in attendance.
No, stick with “dumbing down.” It’s the right usage.
Interesting, thought provoking read. Love the James Patterson idea.
Thanks, Barry,for your comments. “Dumbing Down?” well… you said it. Although I love David’s comment about nuance. That takes some of the sting out of it.
Libby–and thank you. David Corbett is one of my culture heroes, but I have to add this: If thought can’t occur in a meaningful sense without language, “nuanced thought and feeling” can only take place to the degree people are capable of nuance.
I lost count a long time ago of the James Patterson books I’ve read. Why it comes as a surprise why they worked so well to keep me turning pages is beyond me. You’ve made a great point with that and some of your other insights here.
My next mystery? One scene chapters and maybe no subplots (although I write in series and I have ongoing threads so that 2nd one will be hard). Maybe for the other series of stand-alones’ I’m ramping up… Who knows? It certainly can’t hurt to try these ideas.
Good luck, Anne!
I saw your name on Facebook and realized you had written “set the Night on Fire.” At the time I was working on a magical realism novel, “Time Passenger,” set at the “Festival of Life” in Chicago, 1968. It was one of the many sources that gave me a feel for the time. I prefer detective fiction to the paranormal, so I’m now working on a three-episode book featuring journalist-detective Gershom Davies: the first episode is set in 1959 Beat Generation Venice, California; the second, aboard the streamliner “Golden State” between Los Angeles and Chicago; and the third, on Chicago’s Skid Row. Since Gershom is a newspaperman, he writes in fairly simple sentences anyway, and because he’s in 1959, I don’t have to deal with mobile phones or hacked computers. I just need to make sure I don’t throw in any anachronisms. That may be easier said than done.
Assuming Gershom and Delia Creswell, the woman he falls for on the Golden State, make it to 1968, I may be visiting the world of the Chicago Convention and the Festival of Life once again.
Thanks for writing. Good luck with Gershom and Delia. I have found, unfortunately, that younger readers don’t have a lot of interest in the late 60s. Not sure why, but FIRE isnt doing as well as some of my other historicals. At any rate, I think it was a fascinating period…