Creating a fictional world

When you write anything, everyone has a bit of advice on the way to do it. And of course no two bits agree. I'm definitely finding this in mysteries. Uber agent and legendary writing coach Donald Maas says every sentence, every paragraph, ever page has to vibrate with tension. Others say description slows down the activity, but then some say description creates the world in which the fictional characters operate. As I rewrite these days I'm most aware of description, because I use quite a bit of it--though, I hope, in small bits. It seems to me that Maas' advice holds true for thrillers and suspense novels--traditionally those where danger is present on every page. Often the victim (or stalkee) knows who the villain is, and it comes to a question of who can outlast who and who can trip the other one up. I recently read Mary Higgins Clark's Pretend You Don't See Her  in which the protagonist, witness to murder, is put in the federal witness protection program. She lets a trivial bit of information slip to her mother in the weekly phone call they're allowed, and the mother, interested in her daughter's welfare, buys a newspaper from the city where she now knows her daughter is, then leaves the newspaper on a chair in a restaurant. You got it--word is quickly sent to the hired assassin after her. So the reader is on pins and needles--will he get her or will she escape? (I truly don't think this much info is a spoiler.) I have always joked that I don't want to read Mary Higgins Clark when I'm home alone--well, I do, but they're scary on every page. That's the kind of tension Maas is talking about.
But I'm writing--or trying to write--cozies, a whole different kind of mystery. Cozies usually feature an amateur sleuth--in my case, a real estate agent who is drawn into solving an old murder because she finds a skeleton in a house she's renovating. Neither the protatgonist nor the reader know who the murderer is nor when someone else will fall victim, so there's your suspense (sometimes I think the author doesn't know either!). But the word cozy implies something different from the nail-biting suspense of the thriller. What draws me into the cozies I read is identifying with the protagonist--she (or he, though it's almost always a she) and the world in which she lives and the people around her become real to me, so that while I read I live in that world. And if it's a really good book, I'm reluctant to leave that world when I finish the book. In the mysteries I'm working on now, the world consists of Kelly O'Connell, her two young daughters, her boyfriend, Policemen Mike Shandy, her assistant Keisha, and the landmarks and houses of Fort Worth's Fairmount district. To make all that real to readers, I have to describe. I'm well aware however of the danger--reader boredom--that lurks in pages and pages of narrative desription. The old writer's saw, "Show, don't tell," is ever true, so it's a trick to work in description yet avoid too much narrative voice. Have I succeeded? Only a good editor will know. My mentor says I have. But it's a constant balancing act.
Readers are as different in their tastes as authors are in their creative leanings. Some prefer noir, exporing the dark underside of life; some prefer taut tension; some prefer the world of cozies--the craft group, the bakery or tea room, the flower shop, and, I hope, the real estate/renovation world. All I can do is keep writing and keep querying. I have a query out now on Skeleton in a Dead Space to Turquoise Morning Press, a small press about which I hear very good things, including that they want mysteries. And I'm working on No Neighborhood for Old Women. But soon my conscience will draw me back to a project with a more sure market: that book on chili.
A marketing note: a man named Joel Kirkpatrick has put together an anthology of first chapters of books on Smashwords or Amazon. He calls it the Bestseller Bound (BSB) anthology, and you can find it at http://www.scribd.com/jbkirkpat. The first chapter of my Mattie is in Volume Two. The anthology is a free download, and if you like the opening of Mattie's story,  you can order it, I think from Amazon or Smashwords. It's hard to publicize digital reprints, so Joel's project seems worthwhile and generous of him.

More about mysteries

Mary Higgins Clark is still scaring me. I think what's frightening about her novels is that she makes you face the possibility of the existence of pure evil in human beings. I remember writing a college paper on Iago, the villain from;Othello. The moral dilemma was whether or not Iago was purely evil or was driven to evil by circumstances and those who conspisred against him. I have always chosen to believe that pure evil does not exist in human beings, but Clark makes me doubt that long-held opinon.
Recently one of the Sisters in Crime lists or sub-lists has had a discussion on meaningful deaths. If you're writing about murder, the victim cannot, should not be a throw-away character. Whoever he or she was, they were (ok, pronoun mix--I recognize it and don't know how to get around it) were meaningful people with lives and hopes and dreams and fears. Someone has to feel the impact of their deaths. In Pretend You Don't See Her, the first victim dies six months or so before the novel opens; the second, in the opening pages but almost off-screen as it were. The reader hasn't had any time to build up identification or sympathy or compassion for that person. On the other hand, through the course of the novel, the reader  comes to know--and at least for me, to like very much--Lacy Farrell who is being stalked and hunted. If she dies, the impact on the reader will be overwhelming. In my Skeleton in a Dead Space, the first victim is, obviously, a skeleton. Hard to work up much sympathy for an unknown person who has been dead for many years, and yet so that the death has some impact, I have had Kelly O'Connell, the main character, create almost a fantasy life for the skeleton, so great is her need to know who that body is. In another novel I'm working on (and have put aside for a long time) the first victim (off-screen) is the central figure's grandmother who raised her--the impact of that is easily portrayed. But there are other deaths--of  scoundrels, each in their own way. How do you work up reader sympathy for that? I think it must come from the impact on the central figure who never expected to come close to murder.
Last night, in editing Skeleton, I had an "aha" moment. One of the things we're told about writing any kind of story is that you have to create characters the reader will care about. But another maxim, for mysteries, is start the suspense right away and keep it going. I realized I'd been so occupied with characters--Kelly O'Connell and her two daughters--that I'd spent lots of time on Kelly picking the girls up from school, what they ate for dinner, homework in the evenings and getting them to bed but I'd left the mystery in the background. I'm working on remedying that. And though I've read that manuscript carefully a least a dozen times, I'm all of a sudden seeing lots of extra words--"I seemed to feel" could be "I felt," and that kind of thing. I wonder how many times one can rewrite and revise. No, I don't want an answer.
Nice day. I had lunch with my friend Charles' daughter, Marsha. It was the first time we visited since his death, and we both talked about him a lot. Marsha is blind, and she has taught me about helping a non-sighted person and, I suspect, about helping people in general. We were going to the Flying Fish which she said she liked a lot but when I mentioned Carshon's she said she really liked that, so there we went, which always suits me fine.
Tonight I was expecting Sue and her parents for cocktail hour. What I wasn't expecting was Jacob, but his mom brought him about 4:45. He settled in to watch TV minus a shirt, and I told him he'd have to put it on when company came. When they arrived, he promptly appeared in the kitchen with his shirt. We got it buttoned and then he was off to watch TV--we didn't see another thing of him, so the shirt didn't really matter. Sue's parents are from Canada but they winter in south Texas, and I do enjoy visiting with them. So it was a pleasant evening. More of the holidy spirit, which I feel strongly this year. I'm convinced 2011 is going to be a good year!

The mystery of mysteries

Once you immerse yourself in the world of mysteries and such lists as Sisters in Crime and Murder Must Advertise, you begin to learn about the various subgenres. It' not easy--there are thrillers and crime fiction and P.I. novels and cozy mysteries, historicals and contemporaries and espionage novels. I am fuzzy on what separates some, but reading Pretend You Don't See Her by Mary Higgins Clark has made one distinction crystal clear to me. Like all of Clark's novels, which I hate to read when I'm home alone at night, this is a thriller. The reader knows from the get-go who the bad guy is and he's never just sort of bad--he's usually sociopathically evil. In this novel, a young woman witnesses a murder and is the only person who can identify the killer, a notorious hired assassin who takes pleasure in killing. She is forced into the Witness Protection Program because the government desperately wants her alive to identify him if and when they catch up with him. I've always vaguely thought the Witness Protection Program would be awful--you have to leave your whole life, including family, behind and go somewhere completely strange--which is what Lacey Farrell does, assuming a totally new identiity. No spoiler here: word gets out where she is, but you knew that or there wouldn't be enough story for the novel. And somewhere in the back of your subconscious you know Lacey is going to return to her old life and her family and maybe take the new man she's met with her. But meantime, the tension from the writing is so palpable and graphic that I frequently have to set the novel down. Take a breather as it were.
I just finished reading Randy Rawls' Death by Diamonds, a P.I. novel in which the P.I. is a woman, thankfully more rounded than Stephanie Plum of Janet Evanovich's books. But still, there are some pretty brutal and violent scenes and deaths in this novel. It's a good read and I liked Beth Bowman and rooted for her, but I could never write some of the scenes in that book. Once again, in this book you know who the bad guy is early on, but how is Bowman going to defeat him.
Which brings us around to cozies, what I'm trying to write: murder and violence happen off-stage, the central figure is usually a female amateur sleuth, and there may be a few hold-your-breath moments, but really the books are just what the word says--cozy. And the reader doesn't know who the villain is and must figure it out along with the central figure--if it's really well done, you don't figure it out ahead and are surprised. But then in some, you can guess. My kind of reading. Now if I can just write a good one. I'm going back to work on Skeleton in a Dead Space after I finish this post.
Warm and sunny here today. I shudder as I read and hear on TV about the awful weather in California and the northern and eastern states. We are having a dry winter, but so far mild. I expect winter to hit like a blast any day now. Meantime this is lovely weather, makes it hard to stay inside and work--and read scary thrillers.