Supporting an Author You Love

by Jaden Terrell

I've been reading Chester Campbell's new thriller, POKSU, and wondering why this guy is not selling hundreds of thousands of his books. I have the same thought when I read something by Timothy Hallinan or some other lesser-known author whose work blows me away. (That includes you, my fellow Murderous Musings contributors.)

We all know there's a handful of authors who need no help in the promotion department because everyone already knows who they are. James Patterson. J.K. Rowling. For most, though, the key to growing a readership is word-of-mouth. No one buys a book they don’t know exists. But with more than two hundred thousand new books launched this year, getting the word out is a challenge.

So how can you help create buzz for an author whose work you love? Let's call her Sally Wimpleton, and let's say she's written a novel called The Garden Gnome Murders. (Sheesh, now I want to write that!) 

1. Ask your local librarian to order The Garden Gnome Murders by Sally Wimpleton.

2. Post a review on Amazon, B&N, Goodreads, Shelfari, or other sites that allow reader reviews.

3. Click the “Like” button the B&N and Amazon pages for The Garden Gnome Murders and for Sally's author page, if she has one. On Amazon, the hardback, Kindle, and audio versions must all be “liked” separately.

4. Make one or more appropriate Amazon lists and add The Garden Gnome Murders to the list(s). Goodreads also has a list function now.

5. “Like” Sally Wimpleton's Facebook page and help keep the discussion there rolling. Invite others to “like” the page and participate as well.

6. Spread the word on your social networking sites, like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc. Retweet Sally's tweets, share her relevant Facebook posts, etc.

7. Recommend the books to all your friends and family members who enjoy the kind of books Sally writes.

8. If you’re in a book club that reads mysteries and is open to author visits, ask if they would like Sally to come and speak to the group (or Skype with them).

9. If Sally has a website with links, articles, or other content readers might like, visit it often and encourage others to do the same. (If she has a newsletter, sign up for that and encourage your friends to sign up too.)

10. If you know people who acquire books for airports, Walmart, Sam’s, Costco, Target, K-Mart, etc., tell them about The Garden Gnome Murders.

11. If you know people in other countries where Sally's book has been translated, let them know about the translation. 

12. If you know a major motion picture director or producer, or any big-name actor who might like to play one of the roles, steer him or her toward the book. Who wouldn't want to see a movie about Garden Gnomes? And Murder?

13. When you order your copy of The Garden Gnome Murders, order another mystery by a well-known author in a similar genre. That gets Sally on the “people who bought x also bought y” list.

Can you think of other ways to help draw attention to a favorite author?

*Note: Sally Wimpleton and The Garden Gnome Murders are fictional creations. Any resemblance to real people or novels, living or dead,is purely coincidental.

The Fear Artist Is an Award Winner

By Chester Campbell

Tim Hallinan is my favorite thriller author. His Poke Rafferty series hits you at the gut level. The characters are a diverse lot that will tug at your heartstrings, make you laugh, absolutely infuriate you, and bring about a dozen other feelings. But they'll remain indelibly impressed on your mind. The stories take you into the heart of Bangkok's seamy side and keep you on the edge of your seat as Poke tangles with a succession of bad guys. I just finished the fifth book in the series, The Fear Artist.

With Poke's Thai wife, Rose, and their adopted daughter, Miaow, visiting Rose's mother in the north of the country, Poke is ready to repaint their house when he collides with a man who dies of gunshots in his arms. The man utters a woman's name and a U.S. city before dying. This makes Rafferty a person a great interest to Thai secret agents who want to know his connection to the dead man and what he was told.

Poke winds up on the run from the police and an American named Murphy who is working with them. In an effort to find out what he's up against, Poke seeks out a motley group of former spies who inhabit one of Bangkok's offbeat  bars. He learns he's been caught on the fringes of the War on Terror being masterminded by Murphy, a man who was involved in the Phoenix Program during the Vietnam War. He's the most sadistic, unprincipled character I've run across in ages.

Like all of Hallinan's books, The Fear Artist delves deeply into the rationale behind the characters' actions. He brings back Poke's half-Chinese half-sister, a sharp-witted, quick-acting teenager, and his best friend Arthit, a Bangkok policeman, who he unhappily deceives. Poke, an expatriate American, expresses a lot of angst at his home country's actions involving the War on Terror and treatment of ordinary citizens, but he is no less critical of his adopted country's policies.

Two Vietnamese women, one with leftover wounds from the war in the sixties and seventies, and a mistreated waif of a girl, a daughter of Murphy's, are particularly poignant characters. The ex-Russian spy Vladimir lends some comic relief to the story.

The Fear Artist, check it out here, should win some awards.

Visit me at Mystery Mania

Bouchercon: Day 1

By Jaden Terrell

Several years ago, I attended my first Bouchercon. It was wonderful, yet overwhelming. Somehow, in my mind, it expanded to a convention of 7,000 people, a vast swarm of humanity I could hardly even fathom. Today, I arrived at the St. Louis Bouchercon. Turns out it's about 1500 people and has ALWAYS been about 1500 people. Somehow, the huge, scary con became a huge, not-so-scary con in just a few years.

I was lucky enough to share the drive from Nashville and a hotel room with another Nashville author, Jennie Bentley )aka Jenna Bennett). Jennie writes a cozy series for Berkley Prime Crime and an e-series of real estate mysteries. If you like well-written, well-crafted light mysteries, you'll like Jennie's books.

I started the day at a panel called "Laughter of the Clowns," moderated by Jerry Healy and featuring Allan Ansorge, Alan Orloff, Gary Alexander, Jack Frederickson, and Robin Spano. Parnell Hall, one of my all-time favorite writers of humor, wasn't on the panel but got a tip of the hat from the panelists. If you've never seen his videos about the writing life, check out "Signing in a Waldenbooks," "Kill 'Em," and "The King of Kindle." Funny guy. Funny panel. I've read Allan Ansorge's books, since he's a beloved member of the Killer Nashville family, but I hadn't read the others. Obviously, I'll have to remedy that.

The panel by the guests of honor was remarkable--at times serious, at times hilarious, at times enlightening. At one point, a humorous and slightly off-color anecdote by Val McDermid rendered the panel speechless as the room erupted in laughter. Add Colin Cotterill, Charlaine Harris, Robert Crais (I heart Joe Pike), and moderator Oline Cogdill, and it was one of the most entertaining panels I've seen. I also enjoyed seeing Charles Todd on the military panel moderated by Matthew Funk.

I've heard a lot of Irish, English, and Scottish accents already and am looking forward to the panel of Irish authors on Saturday. I'd like to pin some of these folks down and just have them talk to me for about a year. Especially John Connolly, whose Charlie Parker series is among my favorites. I just finished The Reapers a few weeks ago and am in awe of the man's talent. And did I mention the accent?

I also got to see one of my favorite authors in the world, Timothy Hallinan. Tim's graciously agreed to let me pump him for information for my third book. As several people today have said, "Mystery writers are some of the nicest people in the world."

To top it off, I finally got to meet our own Leighton Gage. After reading so many of his charming posts, it was a pleasure to see him in person.

Having a great time. Wish you were here!

FOX FIVE: Five Charlie Fox Short Stories by Zoe Sharp

By Jaden Terrell

Between helping organize the Killer Nashville conference and scrambling to meet the demands of an increasingly demanding day job, I haven't had a lot of time to read for pleasure lately, but now that the conference is over (for now), it's time to catch up. My newest discovery is English thriller writer Zoe Sharp. (Sorry about the missing umlaut, Zoe. If I can figure out how to get it on there, I will. Gentle readers, it should be inserted above the "e".)

My first encounter with Zoe's work was in her new short story anthology, Fox Five: A Charlie Fox Short Story Collection. All five stories in the book feature Sharp's recurring character, Charlotte "Charlie" Fox, a former Special Forces soldier who now works as a self-defense instructor and sometime bodyguard. In "A Bridge Too Far," the first story in the book and the one that occurs before Charlie goes pro, Charlie finds herself hanging out with a group of thrillseekers, members of the local Dangerous Sports Club. When the dangerous sports turn out to be, not just dangerous, but deadly, it's Charlie who recognizes that these "accidents" are anything but accidental.

This well-crafted story hooked me early and kept me reading. The other stories, "Post Cards From Another Country," "Served Cold," "Off Duty," and "Truth and Lies" are equally good. Sharp's writing is crisp and vivid, well-crafted but unpretentious.

Of Sharp's protagonist, Charlie Fox, Paul Goat Allen of the Chicago Tribune, said, "Ill-tempered, agressive, and borderline psychotic, Fox is also compassionate, introspective, and highly principled: arguably one of the most enigmatic--and coolest--heroines in contemporary genre fiction."

Charlie is a jill-of-all-trades, but Sharp is no slouch in that department. She's worked as a van driver, horesback riding instructor, pension and mortgage advisor, and member of a yacht delivery crew. Her hobbies include "sailing, fast cars (and faster motorbikes), target shooting...and reading everything [she] can get her hands on." Her novels have taken her to bestseller status with the Independent Mystery Booksellers' Association, and she's been nominated for a Barry Award for the Best Crime Novel. Last year, Twentieth Century Fox optioned her series for television.

Sharp is working to upload the first five books in the Charlie Fox series (the hardest to get these days and the ones to which she has gotten back the rights) to Kindle and later to other e-readers. I, for one, will be on the lookout for them.

To read more about Zoe Sharp and her books, check out this interview with Timothy Hallinan at The Blog Cabin.

Confessions of a Kindle Killer

by Jaden Terrell

I came late to the electronic revolution. I love books, love turning the pages, love the look of print on the page (which is not the same as e-ink, no matter what people say), love being able to carry them around with me and not having to worry about plugging anything in. Love everything about them.

Last year, my husband bought me a Kindle for my birthday. I liked the way I could download books so easily (though it took great strength of will not to burn through my paycheck ordering $2.99 novels from Amazon. I liked the way I could make the print larger if I needed to. Above all, I liked that I could carry hundreds of books with me when I traveled. The Kindle didn't take the place of my beloved books, but it was a pretty cool supplement.

Of course, there were downsides too. Although it held a charge pretty well, having to recharge it regularly was a bit of a pain--especially if I let the battery get low and had to plug it in at a crucial point in the plot. And I noticed that, for some reason, I found it easier to put down a book that I would, if I'd bought it in print, have read straight through, and I wasn't as likely to carry it around with me to read in restaurants or in free moments in waiting rooms. I didn't love it, but I liked it a lot.

I liked it even better when I found several books I needed to research my next Jared McKean mystery. They weren't $2.99, but they were cheaper than they would have been in print. Then Timothy Hallinan e-published all his Simeon Grist books and the first of a new series. A long-time Hallinan fan, I bought them all. I was starting to feel pretty happy with this new technology.

I started carrying the Kindle around the house with me, as if it were a regular print book, reading as I took my vitamins, brushed my teeth, brushed my hair, fed the cat. Well, you can imagine the rest. As I stood at the bathroom sink, toothbrush in one hand, Kindle in the other . . . I dropped the Kindle.

It struck the floor, face down, with a sickening crack. Oh no. I picked it up, a feeling of dread settling in my stomach. The screen was intact, but the image looked like an angry orangutan had thrown a tantrum on an Etch-a-Sketch. I tried to turn off the device. No luck. The fractured image was frozen on the screen. I told myself maybe it was in shock and just needed a little time to settle down. No such luck. By morning, it was clear.

The Kindle was dead.

Mike says he plans to replace the Kindle when my next birthday comes around. I have my reservations. It seems like maybe I should wait until they come up with a klutz-proof version. Still, I've managed to keep my laptop intact, so maybe there's hope. Maybe I could get one of those little slings like people carry babies in. Do they make padded Kindle-carriers? Maybe I could make a sort of safety belt for it--hook it to my belt with a carabiner?

Hmm. Maybe I could invent one and market it for a gazillion dollars. Surely I'm not the only Kindle-Killer around.

Ramblings

By Jaden Terrell

I just got home from work (after 10 PM) and remembered Thursday is my day to post.. Since I'm afraid all hope for a coherent post is gone, I'm going to just throw out some random thoughts and links that I've recently found of interest. I hope you will too.

First, the inimitable Nathan Bransford has just announced the finalists in his "best first paragraph" contest. I'd say they're pretty darn good, but the rules forbid campaigning for your favorite, so I'll just say, if you hop over to Nathan's site, you can vote on the one you like best.

Speaking of things we like best, Timothy Hallinan, author of the Poke Rafferty Bangkok thrillers, is still doing his 365-day blog project. He has a much cleverer name for it than that, but I can never remember the whole thing. Anyway, I made a pledge to comment on all of them, and I am reeeeeeeeeeally far behind, but I will keep my word. In the meantime, if you haven't been reading them, you're missing out on some great posts. Tim's latest book, The Queen of Patpong was just nominated for an Edgar. It's a marvelous book, which I reviewed on Murderous Musings when it came out. I'm rooting for Tim. Also, I harbor a secret, superstitious hope that hobnobbing with Edgar nominees will somehow make me one of them.

Finally, for anyone seeking a giant, yet terribly rewarding time-suck, you might like to check out Absolute Write and the Absolute Write Water Cooler (forums). I think I've posted about them before, but I finally joined tonight. I haven't had time to explore the sites, but they seem to be chock full of great information and advice for writers. (What exactly is a chock, anyway? Does anybody know?)

Review: The Queen of Patpong

Review by Beth Terrell

A few years ago, I passed a rack of discounted hardback books. One captured my attention. The title, A Nail Through the Heart, was evocative; the cover was attractive; and I had just read a post by the author, Timothy Hallinan, on DorothyL, a newslist for mystery lovers. Wanting to support a fellow DL-er, I picked it up and read a few lines. They were good. Very good. So, I bought it, beginning a long-term love affair with Hallinan's series of beautifully written thrillers set in Bangkok and featuring "rough travel writer" Poke Rafferty. Poke writes travel books for people who want to experience the parts of the world not included on the usual lists of tourist destinations. Some of those parts are a little seedy, a little gritty, and a little dangerous. When he arrives in Bangkok to research a new book, he falls in love with Thailand, the Thai people--and with Rose, a beautiful bar dancer in the red-light district of Patpong. Together, they rescue and adopt Miaow, a street child who struggles to reconcile her love for her adoptive parents with her shame about her roots and about Rose's former profession.

In the fourth book in the series, The Queen of Patpong, as Poke, Rose, and Miaow are dining at a favorite restaurant when Rose "drops her fork with a clatter on top of her cup, which tips over and spreads coffee across the tablecloth." A man approaches the table, someone who knew Rose when she was a dancer. After threatening her and her family, he swaggers away, and Rose tells Poke that the man is someone she thought--and had hoped--she'd killed.

With the help of a menacing partner, the stranger begins a cat-and-mouse game clearly intended to end with Rose's death--and the deaths of her loved ones. Hallinan plays out the plot masterfully, juxtaposing the elements of a tense, modern-day thriller with a sensitive exploration of Rose's past and her transformation from an awkward village girl nicknamed "Stork" to the strong, confident woman she has become.

Much of the book takes place in the past, beginning with Rose's discovery that, although her father has accepted money from her teacher to keep her at home and in school, he has also sold her to someone in the sex trade. She escapes this all-too-common situation with the help of Nana, a former village girl turned bar dancer. Nana also "sells" her, but into a more benevolent system.

Hallinan balances the various elements of this book perfectly. The tension is high throughout. The moral message is both powerful and subtle. Poke's determination to save both the lives and the emotional fabric of his family engages the reader from beginning to end, and the portrayal of Rose is pitch-perfect--thoughtful, insightful, and always authentic.

If you've already fallen in love with Timothy Hallinan's Poke Rafferty series, The Queen of Patpong will cement your loyalty. If you haven't...it's probably because you haven't read him.

Just Finish The Dang Thang

By Pat Browning

I’ve been sitting on a half-finished manuscript for five years. My excuse: Life happened. So what? Life happens to everyone.


Except for an outline and a storyboard leaning up against my wall I might have lost track of the narrative years ago, but sometimes I get lucky. Just in time to keep my Work-in-Limbo from slipping through my fingers I came across Timothy Hallinan’s 10 Rules For Finishing A Book.

Hallinan has written ten mysteries and thrillers under his own name and several others in disguise. In the 1990s he wrote the critically acclaimed Simeon Grist mysteries about a brainy, overeducated LA private eye. His current series, set in Bangkok, where he has lived six months each year since 1981, features American "rough travel" writer Philip "Poke" Rafferty, who lives in Bangkok with his hand-assembled family: his Thai wife, Rose, a former Patpong bar dancer, and their adopted daughter, Miaow, who was eight years old and living on the sidewalk when she met Poke.

The first three Rafferty books, which have made Ten Best lists everywhere, are A NAIL THROUGH THE HEART, THE FOURTH WATCHER, and BREATHING WATER. The fourth, THE QUEEN OF PATPONG, will be published in August by William Morrow and is available now for pre-sale on Amazon.com.

Before becoming a full-time writer, Hallinan had his own international consulting company, advising Fortune top 100 companies on their television activities.


In the Blog Cabin on his web site, Hallinan writes:


“I’d estimate that 98% of all the novels people begin are never completed. Every person who abandons a book feels that he or she has a good reason, but my experience suggests that most of those books could have been finished – the writer just came up against something he or she couldn’t handle.”


The section of his blog titled “Finish Your Novel” is a great resource for writers. It’s in six parts:
1) Introduction and overview;
2) Getting started;
3) Following the line;
4) Getting out of trouble;
5) Finishing up and some thoughts on publishing;
6) Additional resources.

You can read all of them here. I zeroed in on “The Ten Rules of Finishing” in Part 2. Many, many thanks to Tim Hallinan for his permission to reprint them here.


****
Timothy Hallinan’s Ten Rules of Finishing.


Lots of people seem to like rules, especially where writing is concerned. The rules I suggest below are meant to help you write your book, but mostly they're intended to help you finish it. Here they are:


1. Write something you would like to read.
This may be the single most important rule. It amazes me how often students come to my class with plans to write a novel they wouldn’t read if it appeared spontaneously on their pillow one morning. For some reason, many aspiring writers think a novel requires a sort of elevation – of prose style, plot, character – everything. It’s a little like people who are wonderful talkers – direct, clear, and entertaining – but who get tied up in knots when they start to write because writing is “different” than talking.


Generally speaking, we should try to write with the same directness and clarity we use when we talk, and when we write a novel, we should write the kind of book we most like to read.


There are two ingredients here: the type of book you write, and what it’s about. Do you read mysteries? Write a mystery. Do your shelves sag under the weight of romances? Write a romance. And write it about something that fascinates you. If you love horses, get horses into the story. If you’re a science wonk, get some science into it. Do both things – if you love thrillers but don’t like science, you’re probably not going to like (or be able to finish) a thriller about subatomic particle physics.


Remember, once you choose the idea for your book, you are going to have to live with it for a year or more. It had better be something that entertains you. Ideally, it’s also a subject you want to learn more about, because you’re probably going to have to if you’re going to write 80-100,000 words about it.


I write thrillers about Los Angeles and Bangkok because I love thrillers and I love Los Angeles and Bangkok. One more time: You should write the book you would most love to read.


2. Your material needs to be something you care about.
You'll find lots more about this in the material that follows. Novels take a long time to write. They will claim every bit of skill and glibness you possess. They will exhaust your store of funny or heartbreaking stories. They'll ransack your childhood for anecdotes. They'll eat your friends alive and spit them out in (hopefully) fictionalized form.


Sooner or later you'll run out of tricks and pure nervous energy, and when you do, you'll learn (possibly the hard way) that the only material that will get you through this marathon is material you truly care about. You will need to care personally about your characters, about the themes of your story, about what's at stake. If you don't, you're going to run out of gas. You're going to quit.


Choose your idea in the first place because (a) it would make a book you would like to read, and (b) you care about the issues it raises.


3. The enemy is not the badly written page; it is the empty page.
If there’s one rule you should write on a card and tape over your desk, this is it. A bad page does a lot of good things: it advances the story, it gives you a chance to work with your characters, it demands that you write all or part of a scene, it challenges you to describe your setting – on and on and on. (It even makes the stack of pages look a little thicker, which can give you a psychological lift.)


So what if it does some of these things badly? You’ve learned one way not to handle that particular piece of material.


But the great advantage of a badly written page is that it can be rewritten. It can be improved. A blank page is zero. In fact, it’s worse than zero, because it represents territory you’re afraid, unwilling, or too lazy to explore. Avoid exploring this territory long enough, and you’ll abandon your book.


4. Perfection is not, and never has been, possible.
Go back to the paraphrased Samuel Johnson quotation at the beginning of the “For Openers” page: A novel is a long work in prose with something wrong with it. Your book won’t be perfect. Your chapters won’t be perfect. Your pages, paragraphs, and sentences won’t be perfect.


And you can’t let that stop you. If you’re dissatisfied with something you’ve written, you always have two choices. First, rewrite it right now. Second, let it stand for the moment and keep writing. You can always fix it later.


One thing I’ve learned to do is to begin every writing session by going back over what I wrote in the last three or four days. That gives me a chance to improve it (or toss it and write it over) and it also gets me back into the state of mind I was in on those earlier days. This makes for more consistency in the manuscript. Another good thing about working this way is that you’re already writing by the time you hit the blank page. Starting your session with a blank page is much more difficult, at least for me.


5. Getting it down is more important than getting it right.
This is a variation on the fourth rule. You need to get from point A to point B. Your character is trapped in a cave, and you need to get him or her out. One character needs to tell another something important. Get it on the page, even if you’re not particularly happy with the way it reads. You need to move the story forward; you need to get these characters interacting.


Once you’ve done that, even if you didn’t do it very well, it’s done. You can improve or rewrite it later. Now, at least, you’re in position to write the next bit.


6. Show, don’t tell.
Like a lot of novelists, Raymond Chandler – probably the greatest American writer of detective stories – was hired as a screenwriter. He hated it, but the money was good, so he went on hating it for quite a while. In his letters (I think), he talks about how he learned one important lesson.


He needed to demonstrate that a marriage was in trouble, and he wrote scene after scene – lots of dialog – to make the point. The screenwriter he’d been assigned as a partner was an old-timer, and he offered the following scene: The man and wife get into an elevator, the man keeping his hat on. (Obviously, this was when men still wore hats.) The elevator goes up and the doors reopen, and an attractive young woman gets on. The man removes his hat. When the young woman gets off, a few floors later, he puts his hat back on. Zero dialog, point made.


The best way to tell us something about your characters is to show it to us. For some reason, every time I teach my class I get a student whose novel begins with someone who can’t get out of bed. Generally, they lie there for quite a while, as the writer tells us how they’re feeling and so forth, and it’s pretty deadly.


I challenged one woman to come up with a way to give us a sense of her character’s frame of mind by showing us something the character does. She came to the next meeting with a scene in which the character forces herself out of bed, plods to the kitchen, and tries to make breakfast. Prying apart two frozen pieces of bread, she snaps one of them in half. Trying to break an egg into a pan, she puts her thumb through the shell. Then she picks up the pan, hot fat and all, throws it against the wall, and sits down and cries. Infinitely better, and much more interesting, too.


7. Specific is better.
Our lives are specific. We don’t just get dressed in the morning, we choose a certain color or style. Our day isn’t just Tuesday or Wednesday; it’s hot or cold, cloudy or sunny, wet or dry. Once I was working with a bunch of 12- and 13-year-olds, kids who lived in a gang area. The idea was to try to give them something else to do, something more productive than getting killed. On the first meeting, I asked them to write two paragraphs about their day.


One kid, a bright boy named Eloy, couldn’t get past paragraph one, and paragraph one began and ended with the word “today.” That was it. The word “today,” written once. I asked him whether there hadn’t been something different about today, something specific that made it different it from yesterday or the day before. Eloy thought about it and said that nothing much had happened, “After we found the baby in the Dumpster.”


Now that’s a specific detail. It’s kind of an extreme detail, but it’s a detail. Details bring things to life. And they tell – or show – us things. People don’t just walk, they walk in a certain way that might tell us how they feel, whether they’ve been injured, whether they want to go where they’re going or dread it, whether it’s hot or cold out, whether they’re wearing borrowed shoes because they can’t afford their own, whether the wind’s blowing, and so forth. They bring us into the world you’re creating, into the characters who live in it.


One other good thing about details: Writing them gives you ideas. Once you begin, for example, to tell us what a character looks like, you see that person more clearly. The way he or she combs his or her hair might tell you something about the character’s parents or general neatness and cleanliness, or whether he or she is trying to seem younger or older. There’s no telling where it will take you, but wherever it is, you wouldn’t have gotten there if you hadn’t focused on the details.


(By the way, in your final draft you might want to cut some of the details. Too many can slow the story or bore the reader. But the story will be stronger if you wrote the details in the first place.)


8. Be true to your idea and your characters, not your story.
The shortest workable description of practically any novel can be started with the words, “This is the story of a person who . . .” The Wizard of Oz is the story of a young girl who finds herself in a magical land and tries to go home again. David Copperfield is the story of a boy who tries to find out who he really is. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is the story of a boy who has to learn to live with the fact that he’s a wizard.


All these descriptions begin with the who. Characters are arguably the most important component of a novel. Generally speaking, people read books to read about people. You can have a great plot, a great setting, a terrific plot twist, and a guest appearance by Hannibal Lecter, but if you haven't worked on your characters, your readers won't stay with you.


You need to know who these people are before you begin to write them, and you need to continue learning about them as you continue to write them. And you need to remember one more thing: the reader doesn't know anything you haven't shown or told him or her. It's no good for you to know that Sally, your heroine, has a richly detailed personal story that dictates the way she reacts, if you keep it to yourself. If all you've told us about Sally is that she's short and wears a plaid skirt, that's all we can be expected to know.


Here's a classic case of putting story before character. We've all seen a movie in which a bunch of characters are trapped in a spooky house with a homicidal maniac/vampire/guest appearance by Hannibal Lecter, whatever. At some point they're all gathered in the living room, relatively safe, and some idiot suggest that they each go – ALONE – to their rooms. And everybody says, “Sure, good idea,” and then they all get killed one by one.


Why? Because the screenwriter needed them to be alone, that's why. Think about what that movie could have been about: ten people and how they deal with fear and mortal peril. An act of extreme revenge by the killer. Instead, it's about ten idiots who go to their rooms alone instead of banding together against the danger. Why? Because the writer put the story ahead of the characters.


9. Treat your reader honestly.
I think that when you invite a reader to devote hours of his or her time to your book, you've made a deal. The deal on the reader's end is that he or she will give you a decent chance before throwing your book across the room. The deal on your part is that you'll do your best to keep your reader interested and entertained, and that you'll deal with him or her honestly.


What does that mean? It means that you'll play by the rules. If your book takes place in a world where people can't fly, you won't save your central character's life by having him/her sprout wings and take off. You won't bring in a deus ex machina at the last moment (literally a “god in a machine”) with the power to resolve the situation. You won't have characters do things they would never do in order to move the story along.


You might spend a lot if energy trying to mislead the reader, but you won't lie to her. Some eighty years ago, Agatha Christie wrote a detective novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, that kicked up a cloud of dust that still hasn't settled completely. The book is narrated by a Dr. Ferris, an apparently saintly character who (spoiler ahead) is unmasked at the end as the killer. All literary hell broke loose – even a critic as exalted as Edmund Wilson, who normally couldn't be bothered with mysteries, chimed in with an essay called, “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?”


Did Christie break faith with the reader? I say, yes, although lots of people disagree. I believe she kept too much to herself and that she represented the character of Dr. Ferris dishonestly. I wouldn't have done it. Of course, I haven't sold millions of copies of my books, either, but I don't think she played fair in this book.


Howard Thurston, known professionally as “Thurston the Great,” was one of the most famous magicians of the early 20th century. (And, of course, as a writer, you're a magician, too.) Thurston believed that the key to his success was in his attitude toward his audience. This is what he wrote:


Long experience has taught me that the crux of my fortunes is whether I can radiate good will toward my audience. There is only one way to do it, and that is to feel it. You can fool the eyes and minds of the audience, but you cannot fool their hearts.

Try to maintain that relationship with your reader, and you'll keep his or her trust.


10. It’s only a book.
When you're writing, it's important to remember that your life does not depend on the outcome of the next paragraph or the quality of the next page. There are life-and-death situations, and this isn't one of them. Writing is something you want to take seriously, something you want to do the best you can, but it's not a lung x-ray. You can get up and walk away from it for a while. You can find other ways to put it into perspective, and we'll discuss a bunch of them later on. And – this is important – writing should be fun, at least part of the time.


There's no quicker way to jam yourself hopelessly on a book than to make it the thing your entire life depends on. Don't turn it into a grim, hang-by-the-fingernails activity because if you do, you'll quit. My best advice is always to remember (a) you can always rewrite something and improve it, and (b) it's only a book.
****

Breathing Water

By Beth Terrell

A few years ago, I read Timothy Hallinan's A Nail Through the Heart, which introduced as a secondary character a street child called "Superman." Superman was rough, unwashed, and defiant, kicking an addiction to yaa baa, and fierce in his protection of the small group of street children he looked after. (Miaow, Poke's adopted daughter, was once one of them.) I loved the book; I liked protagonist Poke Rafferty and his cobbled-together family; but Superman completely won my heart.

Now, in Breathing Water, Hallinan brings Superman back to the page, and while the book would be breathtaking without him, his presence puts the book firmly onto my "best books of all time" list. This beautifully written book is the third in Hallinan's series of Bangkok mysteries. It is certainly the richest and the most complex. Once again, the book features "rough travel writer" Poke Rafferty, his Thai wife, Rose, and their adopted daughter, Miaow.

When the book opens, Poke is engaged in a poker game that is actually a sting operation engineered by his friend Arthit, a police officer. Poke is playing with a group of very rich, very powerful men.The three millionaires were expected, but no one expected the man Poke thinks of as "the Big Guy"--Khun Pan. Pan started his life as a penniless village boy, and somehow he has become one of the richest men in Thailand. He is a hero to the poor and dispossesed, and some believe that, if he wanted to become prime minister, he might actually win. To the powerful elite who have always controlled things and believe they should always control things, this is unacceptable.

During the game, Poke wins the opportunity to write Pan's biography. The next morning he is threatened by a nameless faction who threatens to kill him and his family if he writes the book. Soon after, he is threatened by another faction who threatens to kill him and his family if he doesn't write it. Both groups mean business, and both have made it clear that they are watching and can snatch his wife and daughter any time they want.

Poke finds himself, his family, and his friend Arthit caught in a political struggle between the country's richest, most powerful, most corrupt, and most ruthless people. In the midst of this crisis, Superman reenters Poke's life. This time, he has a young woman and a baby in tow; they have run afoul of a baby-selling ring, and Superman (now known as Boo) hopes Poke can help them.

Hallinan portrays the political situation with depth and sensitivity. Pan and the other players are multilayered and complex. It is clear that Hallinan loves Bangkok with all his being, and that he, like his protagonist, has "a yellow heart."

Although all three books stand on their own, I believe Breathing Water is greatly enriched by a knowledge of the events of the previous two books. The more mature Superman's is all the more engaging if you've met him as a child. A subplot involving Arthit and his wife Noi is made all the more poignant by Hallinan's measured revelation of their relationship throughout the series. Miaow's conflicted feelings about the world and her place in it have grown in complexity from the first book to the third.

This book has been called the best thriller of the past five years. I only wish I'd been the first to say it.

Want a Different Cup of Tea?

By Chester Campbell

Ben Small was right on with his depiction of that “scary dude,” James Lee Burke. I’d like to offer a completely different cup of tea, one I found both enjoyable and intriguing. I’m referring to Timothy Hallinan and his new series featuring expatriate travel writer Poke Rafferty. Poke (or Tim) chose Bangkok as his stomping grounds, and he haunts the seamy underbelly of the Thai capital.

I reached the end of the first chapter of the first book, A Nail Through the Heart, before I realized it was written in the present tense. Like lots of readers, I harbor a prejudice against present tense. Tim Hallinan does it seamlessly.

I recently finished the second in the series, The Fourth Watcher, which brings in more of Poke’s family background. Talk about dysfunctional families, you ain’t seen nothing yet. His immediate circle includes fianceé Rose, a former go-go dancer in Patpong Road, where bucks or baht will buy you anything, and adopted daughter Miaow, a waif he rescued off the street.

Past experience added to the intrigue of the setting as I spent a month traveling in Southeast Asia with my then-wife, son, and Korean daughter-in-law. That was back in 1987 when my son had just completed a tour of duty with an Army Special Forces team assigned to Thailand. We visited Korea, Singapore, Thailand, Hong Kong, and The Philippines.

The character Raffery’s name brought to mind Raffles Hotel in Singapore, where the Singapore Sling was invented. He’s much more complicated than the drink. The Bangkok descriptions reminded me of walking through the city on a Sunday morning, at times pushing it to keep pace with my son, a two-mile cross-country runner. Plus later in the week marveling at the dissonance of travel sounds while cars, trucks, buses, motorcycles, and assorted wheeled vehicles dodged about through hairbreadth holes in the traffic flow.

Tim Hallinan’s descriptions are not lengthy. In fact, most are quite brief. Pithy would be a good label. They paint a colorful picture in a few words. Like this image of Rose’s friend clutching a brown paper bag full of money:

“Peachy is staring at the bag as though it has a red digital countdown on its side, signaling the number of seconds before the world ends.”

Or this one:

“The man nearest Rafferty also has a gun in his hand, a tiny popgun just big enough to die from.”

The books are thrillers and full of suspense, but it’s the characters, including the city of Bangkok, that keep the story shining with brilliance and unputdownableness (so I made that one up; I can be creative, too).

As you might have guessed, Tim divides his time about half in the States (he hails from Los Angeles) and half in Southeast Asia, primarily Thailand and Cambodia. He also teaches writing and has a wealth of information on learning the craft under Writers’ Resources at his website: http://www.timothyhallinan.com/.