Mystery News

PAUL KEMPRECOS
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Mystery News

VOLUME 13 NUMBER 3 APRIL/MAY 1994

Mystery Writing 101 Can Ease the Pain

by Paul Kemprecos

    I didn’t have a clue what I was doing when I wrote my first mystery novel, Cool Blue Tomb. My fiction experience consisted of some Christmas stories for a weekly newspaper. The only mystery writers I had read were Raymond Chandler and Conan Doyle. Whodunits turned me off; I could never figure out who done it.
    Like others, I got into mystery writing after saying, "I could do better than that." With audacity borne of ignorance, I wrote sample chapters and a proposal for a series book based on a treasure-hunting story I’d tried unsuccessfully to market as nonfiction. Meg Ruley at the Jane Rotrosen Agency in New York saw the possibilities. Bantam signed me to a two-book contract. Now all I had to do was write the rest of the book.
    Almost immediately I hit the mental and physical barrier athletes call, "the wall." I remember staring with glazed eyes at the blank screen of my Mac, my mind in total confusion. I didn’t have the foggiest notion what to do next. Terminal self doubt set in. What a fool I’d been to attempt this. I had no business writing fiction. I’d have to pay the advance back. The whole weight of the Bantam/Doubleday/Dell publishing empire rested on my tired and unworthy shoulders.
    The Wall.
    Fortunately, I couldn’t return to my old job, so I had to go on. I stretched out on the sofa and thought about the book. Still horizontal, I made a list of all my characters. Bingo! Killing off a minor character named Geetch freed the creative logjam. A few months later, with some misgivings, I sent the manuscript off to new York.
    Kate Miciak, my editor at Bantam, must have worn down a gross of number two pencils editing the manuscript. She had major problems with a few minor details such as plot, character and setting. With a big knot in my stomach, I reread her letter and discovered that she was offering some encouraging suggestions which she elaborated on during a long telephone conversation. Don’t try to write Magnum. Don’t try to write Philip Marlowe. Be yourself. It as excellent advice. I took a legal pad to the beach and sketched out the suggested changes. After a few more rewrites, I got a call from Kate who said the book was great.
    To my surprise, the Private Eye Writers of America agreed. The PWA awarded Cool Blue Tomb a Shamus as the best original paperback published in 1991. Sue Grafton made the announcement at a Bouchercon. (Even more thrilling, she shook my hand and winked at me.) Pretty heady stuff for a first-time author.
    I have written four books since Cool Blue Tomb. And I still lie down on the sofa when my mind goes into neutral. While writing does not get any easier, I hope that it is getting better. I’d be the first to admit on-the-job writing does work. You simply don’t forget margin comments like: "Show Don’t Tell!." "Yuck" "Ugh!" Or, "Dull, dull, dull!" Similarly memorable are those times an editor writes: "I love it!" Heck, you’ve done something that works.
    But this can be tough on the fragile ego of even battle-scarred writers. Last year, with my own painful fumblings in mind, I taught a mystery writing course at a local community college, hoping to spare new writers some of the headaches I went through.
    A couple of fellow members of the New England MWA chapter were teaching mystery writing courses in and around Boston. I wondered if similar interest existed in my area and proposed a course for the continuing education division of Cape Cod Community College. The college has a fiction writing course, but the adult ed class coordinator had read my books and thought the course would be a great idea.
    One fall evening, I walked into a classroom, drew a skull and crossbones on the blackboard, under it wrote "Mystery Writing 101, and nervously awaited my students. I had put a limit of twelve students. The college had signed up fifteen. The eventual class size was thirteen. Cape Cod has a big retirement population, and I expected the class to include mostly older people who read a lot, but weren’t serious about writing. There was only one retiree, though, and he turned out to be a pretty good writer. Most were working people in their thirties and forties, split more or less evenly between male and female. A few people lived a good distance away.

  Their interests ranged from British type cozies to hard-boiled private eye. One woman wanted to write like Carl Hiassen. (Well, so do I). Another was into romantic suspense.
    Competing with the Teutonic declamations from the German class in the next room, I did a quick recap fo the history of the mystery to show how the genre had evolved and subdivided from Dame Agatha’s day. I brought in some show and tell: cover art, bound galley, contract, and described how I came to be published. The main thing I tried to get across in the first session was: if I could get published, they could too.
    I talked to Karin McQuillan, author of the Jazz Jasper series, who had taught a similar class in Boston, and to Peter Abrahams, a writer of thrillers who lives of Cape Cod. J. Dayne Lamb, who taught in Boston, generously shared her class outline. Out of their suggestions came a loose format.
    Generally, I started with a lecture on the basics: beginnings, middles and endings. Dialogue. Plotting. Character. I read from many writers (including myself) to illustrate what I was talking about. Then we discussed works in progress. Some students bravely circulated chapters for criticism. Often comments were quite perceptive. The class demanded homework, so I gave out exercises in dialogue and description, explaining these were the problems a working author deals with everyday. I made copies of edited pages of my own stuff to show them what an editor liked and didn’t. I brought in a quest speaker, Sally Gunning, who writes more in the cozy style, and they peppered her with questions.
    I tried to get the class to participate. One student whose own middle-class background was insulted from the sleazier aspects of like was having trouble describing a call girl. So we "built" a prostitute, starting with birth. I threw out the "whys" and the "wheres" and before long we had a living, breathing hooker.
    To show the class where to get ideas, I read news briefs from The Boston Globe. I singled out a feature story about a cyberspace Lothario in California who’d been using the computer networks to meet women. His bed-hopping habits came up during a women’s electronic discussion group, and his name went out over their modems with a warning to other women. I was impressed by a quote which said people reveal more about themselves over the computers than they would face to face. I posed a possibility. Suppose a serial killer was using the electronic boards to track down victims. Within half an hour, we had a pretty good plot going.
    A question I heard often was whether to write an outline. I told them to do whatever works, but advised sketching out their stories, and brought in the proposal for my second book so they could see how it was done. They were fascinated by the business aspects of publishing. They loved the hand-outs I gave them from mystery newsletters.
    They were intensely interested in nuts and bolts issues, such as how to get an agent. My own agent had suggested that one way was to find a mentor. It didn’t take the class long to start calling me, "Mentor."
    The class was incredibly faithful about attendance. Often they were reluctant to take a break.
    In the last session, I advised them to think about the mystery’s conventions as guidelines rather than rules, not to use their outlines as a crutch, and to let their imaginations soar. Only in this way would they come up with the uniqueness they would need to sell their work in a world where real life is so much more bizarre than any fiction.
    I may have gotten as much from the class as my students did. Teaching focused my mind on things I had done instinctively before.
    The course apparently motivated as well as showed how. Ex-students formed a writing group that meets every Wednesday at a local Burger King. One writer is two thirds of the way through her book. Another scrapped a manuscript we discussed in class and is going great guns on a fresh book.
    I’ve scheduled another class for this semester. Obviously, it can only be a question of time before I go to the book-signing and have someone dedicate their work to "Professor Paul."

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