Life on the edge: Random thoughts on mountains and manuscripts

If I had one talent as a mountaineer, it was the complete absence of a voice in my head telling me to be afraid of the edge. I have zero fear of falling and an absolutely unfounded belief in my own sense of balance.

The view of Steven's Canyon (and my boots) from Faraway Rock, Mount Rainier. Photo by the author.

Maybe I am stretching my metaphor too far, but my brain's absolute refusal to be afraid of falling has mostly served me well in both the life outdoors and at the typewriter. I have climbed plenty of mountains that were beyond my actual abilities as a climber just because I was too dumb to notice, and I have attacked many a story that other writers might shy away from out of fear that they would fall into the canyon of cliche.

Writing Howard Carter was a bit of a high wire act. Every plot element, every theme I was exploring had long ago been cast in bronze as a science fiction trope. I had a list of them that I wanted to use ranging from the freeze ray to the boy genius and as I ticked each of them off the list, I knew I was walking a ledge and in danger of my story plummeting to its death.

My newest Work In Progress actually, honestly, scares me in a way that actual cliffs do not. It's not because I've never written anything in this vein before, but because the path through the world of mysteries and thrillers is so well trod and the cliches so numerous that there are cliffs on every side and new ones opening before me with each previous one I successfully traverse.

That might be overselling it a little, but I'm not sure that the same couldn't be said for everything we write.

As authors, we live in a world where all the mountains have been climbed before. There aren't many 'first ascents' left for us to assay. So we walk in the footsteps of those who came before us and try to be aware of the anchors that they set along the path; some of them are solid and secure and we would be fools to ignore them while others are set in crumbling stone and we trust them at our peril.

It's an imperfect metaphor and I don't climb mountains as much as I used to, but I've been spending a lot of time thinking about it recently as I laced my literal boots and set out through the meadows and valleys of Western Washington.

Unlike writing, mountaineering is often (but not always) a team sport. And it's here that my metaphor has the greatest chance of falling apart completely. In mountaineering, of course, you take precautions involving ropes and anchors and companions who will either point out that you're being an idiot or they will feed you more rope.

Writers are mostly solo artists, but I think most, if not all of us, have that First Audience. For Howard Carter, I threw it out there for anyone who reads this blog to see and invited the world to point out when my footing was uncertain and I should back away from the ledge.

In writing, you anchor your story in the truth of the scene and at the other end of the rope is your audience's faith in you. No matter how the tropes and cliches blow and circle you and attempt to knock you off the ridge, you cling to the truth of your scene and rely on your First Reader(s) to let you know if you're doing okay and feeding you more rope, or you're being an idiot and should turn back and try another route.

Either way is fine, I'm not afraid of falling and I don't mine living life on the edge as long as I have someone I trust not to let go of the rope.

Teaser Tuesday :: The Mummer's Masque

An early glimpse at the beginning of The Mummer's Masque, my current work in progess, a mystery/suspense novel I've been working on in the background of working on the Howard Carter novel.

I usually have more than one story going at a time. It's still a bit rough, but I wanted to share...

-Scott

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One

It was October and it was raining, which was right and proper for Seattle.  AJ MacLeod was wearing handcuffs and riding in the back of a police car, which was not.  He was also apparently dead -- at least as far as the Seattle press was concerned -- but that was easily remedied by demonstrating to the nearest doctor that he had a pulse.

The handcuffs might be a bit trickier.

Twenty minutes ago, he was in a school library interviewing a potential student for the MacLeod Academy, where he was headmaster, when the vice principal busted in and accused him of being an imposter.  MacLeod had a bad habit of losing his wallet and keys anyway, so he had very little to proof to counter a news anchor that insisted he was dead in the street on Queen Anne.

Anger. Shouting. Handcuffs. Cops.

It was probably just as well he had chosen to be an academic instead of going into the family business. He would have made a lousy smuggler and a worse embezzler.

As they waited their turn on the entrance ramp for Interstate 5, a man standing on the corner smiled at him and waved.  The man held a sign that simply said “Calm Down” and people were stopping to hand him money even though the sign didn’t ask for any.  MacLeod thought the advice was probably worth a couple of bucks too, but he doubted the detectives would allow him to roll the window down.

He didn’t have any cash on him anyway.

“So, aside from looking for new ways to make my life miserable, why is the Seattle press so sure that I’m dead?” 

Summer Reading and Recommendations

My reading list is shaping up and the summer is looking good if I can ever get through the first half of this re-write so I can reward myself with some fiction. Mystery/Thriller One should always be well-read within your genre and cognizant of the greats. These are the people that crowd the field I'm trying to elbow my way into... well, into the crowd that's gathered to touch the hems of their robes anyway. The new Jack Reacher Novel by Lee Child is out. The reviews are consistently good: Pure thriller, shootemup adventure. Jack Reacher is who all those other anti-hero characters are trying (and failing more often than not) to emulate. The LA Times link I just gave you also bears mentioning because it brings up the crucial evolutionary step preceding Reacher, Parker by the late, lamented, Donald Westlake. Unabashedly macho, admittedly criminal, these characters are nonetheless compelling and if you do nothing else, read them to learn how to create empathy in your readers for characters that aren't entirely likable! After that, there's a new Michael Connelly mystery The Scarecrow which pulls its plot from the headlines, featuring a reporter (recurring character Jack McEvoy from The Poet) about to be fired in the latest round of budget cuts at his newspaper. He preps a story sure to send him out with a bang and soon all hell breaks loose. I haven't read it yet, obviously, but Connelly consistently proves that writing about cops, criminals and crime doesn't mean you're not creating literature. And with October's release of the new Harry Bosch novel Nine Dragons, I'm confident I won't be disappointed. Incidentally, I don't often recommend authors unreservedly, but if you've never heard of him (or even if you have), go out and find yourself some David Hewson novels. His new one "Dante's Numbers" carries a title that gives the mistaken impression that he's another Dan Brown clone, but he's been out there for years with his ensemble cast of characters, turning in consistent crime fiction from the mean streets of Rome. (Yes, Rome. As in Italy.) Start with "Season For the Dead" or "Villa of Mysteries" and you won't regret it. I've read a lot of literature by female authors, but it became clear to me recently that there's a paucity of women on my mystery/thriller shelves. (This revelation was prompted in part by the tempest stirred by Ian Rankin's remark about female crime writers being more violent than male writers of the same genres.) My reading table now includes some women who are entirely new to me including Val McDermid, Manda Scott and recent Edgar Award Winner Tana French's "In The Woods". All chosen based on recommendations of friends and by the old standard of reading the ad copy, back cover and first chaper while standing in the bookstore. More recommendations of overlooked feminine voices in crime fiction? Leave them in the comments!! The Classics Every summer I do my best to mow through some of the classics that I either missed or glossed over in the past. This generally includes one very old masterpiece. Last year was Canterbury Tales and Don Quixote before that, generally balanced by sundry modern works. This summer, I will be making my way through The Divine Comedy once more. I last read it as a teenager and didn't get it so much as have it spoonfed to me and that's no way to create a real appreciation for or understanding of a significant work of western literature. I'll be filling in around the edges with the collected short stories of O. Henry, Hemingway, Kipling and Chekov. There isn't a reader alive whose erudition couldn't be improved by the addition of more great short fiction. RECOMMENDATIONS SOUGHT! Being between novels, my non-fiction mental hummingbird has nowhere to alight and is madly flitting about between gardening books and home-improvement guides. I need something solid to sink my teeth into, a great biography I might have missed or a scathing expose of Cleopatra's court or something... I'm game for just about anything, so send me your recommendations. Nothing really scandalous or titillating, just a great non-fiction read in an area I might otherwise overlook. What's on your list?

Murder Most Fictional

It's deep in the twentieth chapter. The bad guys are ascendant but the good guys are getting complacent. Too many characters have stepped out of their background roles and are threatening to take over the narrative.

You're just gonna have to kill someone.

I'm not a writer of murder mysteries per se, but in any bit of fiction featuring as much peril as the modern historical thriller demands, someone's going to die at some point. That said, I firmly believe that the only way to do this without making it trite or feel like you're manipulating your readers is to walk into it without knowing which characters will still be alive in the epilogue.

Look at it this way: If I don't know who will die when the time comes, I can't take those extra annoying steps to ingratiate him to the reader. My writing can only prosper thereby.

In my books, no one gets script immunity.

That being said I hate a lot about the presentation of death in modern fiction. Only in some few cases does it read as real. Not in terms of the death throes of the fallen or the medical steps undertaken to save them and God knows reality isn't spared on the autopsy table, but in terms of the reactions of the people who should be impacted by the passing of the fallen. Only when the death of the character and the effects upon the family and friends are the plot (Lovely Bones springs to mind) does the death of a character really seem to have the full force and effect of a real death upon real people.

Awhile back when Newsweek said that writers didn't kill enough people anymore, I was affronted on some level. This was partially because the genre shelves of your neighborhood bookstore have a bodycount that surpasses imagining for even the most motivated serial killer. I went back and reread that article and got something different from it. Not that writers don't kill enough people, but that we sell it short as a literary device and as a moment of common humanity. And on that point I tend to agree.

From the standpoint of a reader, one of the worst offenses any writer can commit is to undersell the real-life psychic impact of a death upon those who witnessed it and those impacted by it. There are so many books that screw that up that it almost qualifies as its own subgenre. Heroes drag a burly forearm across their misty eyes and then carry on as if nothing happened. At best the impact seems to last a couple of chapters before the next love scene or comic relief character "snaps them out of it" and all is well. Sometimes (in a series) it's implied that the characters do their grieving between books, which is at least acknowledging the humanity of the characters.

Killing a character is more than taking a trip to the library to read Guns & Ammo or a medical journal, or making a call to your friend the ER nurse. Death goes beyond the straight razor or handgun that does the deed, and makes deep changes in everyone it touches. Changes that go beyond snapping out of it because someone makes a smartass comment or two people fall into bed.

Not every book with a death in it would benefit from a widening circle of grief and pain, far from it. But to not pay attention to this aspect, to the experience of it is to pay no heed to the value of the fallen character or the humanity of those he left behind. . . but I guess that's why they call it fiction.