Old Dog, New Tricks

Here are a handful of writing-related stories worth chewing over this weekend:

If you really want to get away with murder, don’t write about it in your best-selling thriller and then taunt the police with evidence of your “genius.”

Cherie Priest made a really strong debut with her horror novel “Four and Twenty Blackbirds.” Here’s what she’s learned since the publication of her first book.

Anybody who has a vested interest in the health of newspaper book review sections should read this (long) article by Steve Wasserman, former editor of the LA Times Book Review.

For a while now, I’ve been playing with this notion of writing a young-adult novel about carnivals and/or amusement parks. As presently conceived, the book would be an inversion of Ray Bradbury’s “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” re-mixed with H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth” and set during the American Bicentennial. Just what everybody’s waiting for, I know, but I’m intrigued by the possibilities.

Towards that end, I’ve been doing some preliminary research. There’s certainly good material available online, including:

 1934 Modern Mechanix “How Carnival Racketeers Fleece the Public”

Lives of the Carnies from LA Weekly

One Source of Amusement Links

The best resource, however, has proved to be a book I found in the Berkeley Public Library, “Carnival” by Arthur H. Lewis. In the late 1960s, Lewis spent six months crisscrossing the East Coast through 30 cities and saw some of the most popular midway acts, everything from the legendary “Ape Show,” in which a beautiful woman transforms into a hairy, ravening gorilla right before your very eyes, to “Spaghetti,” a murdered carnie whose family never paid for his burial and whose embalmed cadaver rested for decades in a glass-enclosed coffin in a Laurinburg, NC garage.

Lewis’s narrative is filled with great details that I wouldn’t have been likely to stumble across elsewhere. Like what it’s like to wrestle a chimp for more than ten seconds. Or how a third-generation tap-dancing donniker man spends his days. Or what exactly a jam auction is. Or how an “Ikey Heyman” axle works on a wheel of fortune.

Intrigued? Well, go hustle up a copy of Lewis’s book, or wait until my fictional version is finished.

The only drawback is that this copy of “Carnival” is now overdue. So I guess I had better sit down tomorrow and take some extensive notes.

I recently joined the “secret cabal” at Blogcritics and today posted my first piece. You can read it there by clicking here, or you can simply keep your eyeballs on this page.

Donald Westlake, screenwriter of “The Grifters, author of “The Hot Rock,” “What’s the Worst That Could Happen?” and many other novels, is one of my favorite thriller writers. Pick up any of his books at random, and you can learn something valuable from it, as well as be guaranteed hours of first-rate entertainment.

Under the pseudonym Richard Stark, Westlake also writes about no-nonsense thief Parker. The character has appeared, always with a different name, in a handful of movies, some of them good (”Point Blank”) and some of them not (”Slayground”). There are currently 23 Parker novels, and many of them epitomize what their author does best. They’re fast, lean, gripping and darkly, darkly funny.

Here are five lessons I’ve learned from Westlake/Stark:

1. Choose a strong title.
   Some of the early Parker novels have titles so terse that they don’t really stick in the memory: “The Score,” “The Outfit,” “The Seventh,” “The Hunter.” I have trouble keeping track of them in my head. But after a 24-year break from writing about Parker, Stark brought him back in “Comeback.” Which was followed by “Backflash.” Followed by “Flashfire,” “Firebreak” and “Breakout.” The titles are down to one word, but they’re evocative and the progression from one to the next is clever without being distracting.
2. Waste no time getting the story started.
   In the early books, the first sentence always started with “When…”
   When the woman screamed, Parker awoke and rolled off the bed. He heard the plop of a silencer behind him as he rolled, and the bullet punched the pillow where his head had been. — “The Outfit”
   When he didn’t get any answer the second time he knocked, Parker kicked the door in. – “The Split”Even without that gimmick, the openings are always active and compelling.

   Parker jumped out of the Ford with a gun in one hand and a packet of explosive in the other. — “Slayground”

   These aren’t books that begin with long ruminations about the weather. There’s action on the very first page.

3. Understand structure.
   Many of the Parker books are organized around a four-part structure. The first two parts are from Parker’s perspective. The third offers multiple viewpoints of a critical plot turn. The final portion wraps things up, again from inside Parker’s head.It’s a particularly effective technique. The third-person limited perspective keeps everything focused and leaves little room for extraneous business. The late-in-the-game breakout from the protagonist’s perspective allows the author to ramp up the suspense by dramatising conflicts that Parker can’t foresee.
4. Don’t be afraid to change your style. Westlake has said that he once grew frustrated with a draft in which Parker kept losing the thing he was trying to steal. Rather than bull his way through a book that wasn’t working, Westlake decided to turn it into a comedy, thereby creating his long-running character John Dortmunder, who first appeared in “The Hot Rock.”
5. If you don’t work to avoid obsolescence, you may wind up having to kill someone to keep working. Although not published with the Stark pen-name, “The Axe” is one of the bleakest novels Westlake has ever written. The tale of a middle-aged middle-manager who strikes back against downsizing by killing off his competitors, “The Ax” is cautionary tale for anyone who has become too complacent about their job security.

I already have one blog, Cheaper Ironies. I have fun with it. It’s a real hodge-podge, though, with posts about book reviewing, comic books, the plays of Tom Stoppard and the continuing travails of the Patterson family in “For Better or For Worse.” There’s no real organizing principle, other than the items amuse me on some (sometimes sophomoric) level.

This blog, however, has a more serious purpose. For a while now, I’ve wanted to take my freelance writing in a new direction, to find fresh methods of generating story ideas for new markets. I have a couple of steady gigs, but who knows how long they’ll last?

This site, then, is about learning new tricks about writing and passing them along to other writers. I want to learn about how to monetize a Web site, what SEO copywriting really means, what the best tools for digital marketing might be, where the exciting online markets are and how to break into them.

That’s sufficient throat-clearing, I guess. If you stumble upon this site, I hope you’ll stick around, post a comment or two.