Tag Archives: Writing

REAL CRIME WRITING FROM A REAL DETECTIVE

By day, Adam ‘R’ is a true-to-life, serving Detective. By night, he advises screenwriters and novelists on realism in their craft. Every day Adam lives in the policing line-of-fire and today he shares his thoughts on DyingWords. 

Adam HomepageDid you see the story about the Detective Sergeant that can’t sleep until the case is solved? You know the one, where this maverick cop breaks all the rules to nab the crook… because this time…it’s personal?

It’s not only cliché, it’s not reality. Detectives work heinous cases every single day and yet they balance their case loads with their regular lives away from work. They still pick up groceries, spend time with the kids, pay bills, and try to remember to put the trash out just like everyone else, regardless of how sickening, depressing, or exciting their work life is.

Adam McconIf you don’t intend to delve into your detective’s personal life, you should probably ask yourself:  Are the circumstances of your story’s “case” really going to cause your detective to be so emotionally invested? Convince your reader that this case is something special. It needs to be for it to be plausible that your detective forgets about the rest of daily life.

Next, there’s the maverick cliché. It takes far more than workaholism and a lacking social life to be a great detective. It takes knowing “the rules” inside and out, and being the best at playing WITHIN those rules! Detectives are investigating law-breakers; they generally shouldn’t be the ones breaking the law. Breaking the rules usually means letting the bad guy go free eventually.

Adam McnultyAs the author, you should understand the consequences your detective faces for not playing by the rules. Just as you want to keep your story moving, real detectives don’t want to waste time when a life is on the line or a suspect might be moments from getting away.

So how do we play by the rules and keep the tempo up? Just like your brilliant detective, learn when the Miranda Admonishment and search warrants are required and what the exceptions are. Research the legal term “exigent circumstances” to learn when your detective can legally boot the suspect’s door without a search warrant.

Another tool your detective should be familiar with is a “telephonic search warrant”. 

Adam Telepone warrantTo obtain that search warrant quickly, your detective doesn’t need to run back to the office and start typing. Armed with an audio recorder and a telephone, your detective can get a prosecutor and a judge on the phone and verbally explain the probable cause for the search warrant. Once the judge says the warrant is approved, your detective can now legally bust down the door. There is obviously a little more to the real legal paperwork process after the recorded phone call, but consider it another tool your fictional detective has for doing things the real way.

Adam badgeYou’ll notice that I keep referring to your protagonist as a “Detective.” It’s important to note that “Detective” is usually a formal rank, one that is one step above a uniformed patrol officer. The rank is often abbreviated as “Det.” and is often equivalent to a Corporal. A detective’s main responsibility is to follow up on the investigations that are started by the uniformed officer’s initial response to a crime.

One of the departures from reality that authors commonly make is to give their investigating protagonist a rank higher than Detective, usually to make the character seem more important or experienced. The reality is the higher the rank your character holds, the less likely s/he is to be actually playing an active role in the investigation. Or worse, s/he is more likely to be a controlling micro-manager that the subordinate Detectives dislike.

Adam IronsideThe rank of Sergeant (or Detective Sergeant) is that of a line-level supervisor, overseeing a team/squad/bureau of Detectives. The Detective Sergeant is the one that will be reviewing all of the incoming reports from the patrol division and assigning workable cases to the Detectives s/he supervises. The Det. Sgt. usually reviews and approves search warrants or reports before being officially submitted. Most importantly, the Det. Sgt. is the one who acts as a buffer between the Detectives and Management.

The rank of Lieutenant (or Detective Lieutenant) is usually considered middle-management. Think of Lieutenants as the spreadsheet obsessed bosses that are mainly worried about budgets and statistics, just like any middle-manager found in the corporate world.

Adam HannaIf you’ve chosen a specific department for your character’s employment, do the research on their rank structure. For example, LAPD has multiple tiers of Detective Rank, such as D-2 or D-3. Some agencies don’t utilize the Lieutenant rank. In the United States, West Coast police agencies rarely have “Majors” or “Colonels” as titles in their rank structure, whereas those ranks are more common in Eastern and Southern states.

If your character is a Det. Sgt., a Det. Lt., or a DCI (for our UK authors), you might be overshooting his or her rank versus the true assignment. None of this is to say you shouldn’t use artistic license in your storytelling.

However, nailing the realities of the police work aspect will make the suspension of disbelief a little easier when the rest of your story leads somewhere a little more off the wall.

*   *   *

Adam AdvisorAdam R. is a real-life, serving Detective in Southern California who also provides technical advising to authors and screenwriters. Adam asked that his last name be masked out of caution for conflict of interest. To learn more about the realities of police work, and how it applies to creating realistic fiction, visit Adam’s blog:

http://www.writersdetective.com/

Follow him on Twitter:  https://twitter.com/writersdetctive

 

 

26 EYE-OPENING WRITING TIPS FROM GREAT AUTHORS

A2All serious writers continually strive to improve their craft.  The best upcoming authors look to the best established writers, historic and current, for advice. Here are 26 timeless, eye-opening tips from some of the most successful authors ever to put words on paper.

The first draft of everything is shit. – Ernest Hemingway

Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, and judgementally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass. – David Ogilvy

If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy. – Dorothy Parker

A3If you intend to write as honestly as you can then your days as a member of polite society are numbered. – Stephen King

I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide. – Harper Lee

A4Notice how many of the Olympic athletes effusively thanked their mothers for their success? “She drove me to my practice at four in the morning,” etc. Writing is not figure skating or skiing. Your mother will not make you a writer. My advice to any young person who wants to write is: leave home. – Paul Theroux

You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club. – Jack London

My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: When you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip. – Elmore Leonard

A5Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. – George Orwell

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. – W. Somerset Maugham

If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time — or the tools — to write. Simple as that. – Stephen King

Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong. – Neil Gaiman

A15Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die. – Anne Enright

If writing seems hard, it’s because it is hard. It’s one of the hardest things people do. – William Zinsser

Write the book the way it should be written, then give it to somebody to put in the commas and shit. – Elmore Leonard

A8Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college. – Kurt Vonnegut

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration. – Ernest Hemingway

Get through a draft as quickly as possible. Hard to know the shape of the thing until you have a draft. Literally, when I wrote the last page of my first draft of Lincoln’s Melancholy I thought, Oh, shit, now I get the shape of this. But I had wasted years, literally years, writing and re-writing the first third to first half. The old writer’s rule applies: Have the courage to write badly. – Joshua Wolf Shenk

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. – Mark Twain

A1If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. – Elmore Leonard

Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that — but you are the only you. – Neil Gaiman

The scariest moment in writing is just before the start. – Stephen King

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative. – Oscar Wilde

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. – Ray Bradbury

A13Write drunk, edit sober. – Ernest Hemingway

Don’t take anyone’s writing advice too seriously. – Lev Grossman

It’ s okay to write shitty first drafts – Anne Lamott

And here’s a bonus that I forgot to put in the original post to make it 27 tips:

A16When asked, “How do you write?” I invariably answer, “One word at a time,” and the answer is invariably dismissed. But that is all it is. It sounds too simple to be true, but consider the Great Wall of China, if you will: one stone at a time, man. That’s all. One stone at a time. But I’ve read you can see that motherfucker from space without a telescope. – Stephen King 

HOW TO START WRITING A NOVEL – WITH RACHEL ABBOTT

Rachel Abbott is psychological thriller writer who has sold over a million novels. Rachel generously shares her views on novel writing with DyingWords followers with this abridged piece which has been republished from her website, Rachel-Abbott.com.

A1The world is full of people who really want to write. For some, it’s a burning ambition. They dream about days of sitting in front of their computer (or even more whimsically, in their attic – with pencil and notebook), having great ideas and getting them all down on paper.

Some of it is like that. It’s exciting seeing your ideas grow and develop and watching the words appear on the page – sometimes it’s as if your sub-conscious has taken over and when you read back your latest chapter you think “where the hell did THAT come from?”. It’s a wonderful experience.

With the growth of self-publishing and the ease with which any writer can publish their work, that dream can become a reality.

But where do you start?

A2I’m sure that everybody writes in a different way. Some people say that they start with the title. Others say they just sit down and write and see what comes out. So I’m just going to talk about what I do – not because it’s the right way, but just because it’s the only way I know.

I start with a question.

In Only the Innocent the question was “What set of circumstances would be so bad that a woman would have absolutely no other option than to kill a man?”

A4It had to be a scenario from which she couldn’t escape. But initially each avenue that I pursued left me with a “but she could do this or that” and it took a long time to work out what would make me kill a man. And for me, that’s the way it has to be. I have to think how I would behave, and not just one of my imagined characters.

For The Back Road I thought about a group of people, each with a secret that they need to hide.

The secrets had to be credible – secrets that you might encounter amongst your own friends. Or at least, the majority of them had to be. Perhaps in one case the secret is darker than the rest. Then I asked myself what kind of catalyst would it take to blow everything apart and expose the lies and deceit, and what would be the outcome. I have been to dinner parties or business dinners and seen looks exchanged between people and thought “I wonder what that’s all about?” knowing that I would probably never find out. To me, that dinner party is real.

That is always my starting position – what is the overall issue that the protagonist has to solve.

A22Then comes the incubation time. Once the initial idea is in my head, I start to carry round a notebook and pencil, and each time I have an idea that develops a character or plot point, I jot it down. There are always plenty of false starts – storylines that I begin to develop and then discard. I think that’s fairly normal (at least, I hope so).

Once I have a rough idea of the beginning – the inciting incident (the conflict that begins the action of the story and causes the protagonist to act) – and the end – how the protagonist solves (or doesn’t) the problem – I switch tack. I start to develop my characters, locations and timelines.

For each character, I find a photograph that matches my idea of how they might look.

A9It may be a picture of a famous person, or it might be a random person that I find in images on the Internet. It doesn’t matter. I grab their photo and put it into their character file. Then I begin to develop their characteristics – Age, date of birth, personality, likes, dislikes, greatest strengths and weaknesses, story goal, past traumas – a whole list of details which gives me a very clear idea of who they are and how they would behave. It also means that I know how to describe them, and because it’s all written down, I can always remember how old they are, what they drink, what secrets they have, what job they do.

Next come the locations.

I was recently interviewed for a blog, and the interviewer very kindly said “I find the atmosphere of place very strong in your novels.  I know those villages – I’ve met those people.  How do you get that atmosphere?”

A3The answer is that I also know these places – because I have found photographs of interiors and exteriors of all the houses or other locations that are featured. In The Back Road I used Google street view to walk around the Cheshire village that I used as my main location, and found the perfect property for my protagonist. I was inspired by an atrium dining room that I saw on an architectural site, and grabbed that image too. I found a map and worked out which road would be “The Back Road” and then plotted where everybody lived. Only that way could I be sure that journeys were logical. Even at the dinner party, I wrote down the menu and a seating plan. It was important to know where everybody was sitting, so that I knew when people had to lean forward to speak across somebody, or when people’s eyes could meet.

Timelines are really important – and not just the timeline of the book.

A14Most people have a back-story – when did they meet? What are the major events in their lives? The back-story timeline is really important, because I have often read books in which a section has made me stop and think, “How old is this person? Does this make sense?” and anything that slows a reader down is bad news. If you are confident because you have the information in front of you, the reader will feel that confidence.In short, then, I need to know every detail so that when I write about a location or a person I have a very clear vision of them in my mind. In The Back Road, if I had any artistic skills, I could paint you a picture of every room in the house, and how the rooms connect with each other. It’s as clear in my head as my own home, and allows me to write with confidence.

Of course, the important thing is the story!

A16As you will have gathered, I am a fanatical planner, and I use two different pieces of software for my planning. My main tool is a piece of software called Scrivener. This has some fantastic features that I will talk about briefly here, but hope to do a more detailed blog post soon. However, it doesn’t do one thing that I need, and that’s to create the equivalent of a story flowchart. For that – and the initial planning stages – I use Storylines.

With Storylines I can either create a number of story threads, or character threads, and I can see them all at the same time on a cork board using individual ‘cards’. The board is arranged in columns for scenes and rows for character or plot threads. I can move these around and see all on one screen how the story develops and how and when characters appear in the story. It gives me the main outline of my book, and the software does so much more than this. You can write your whole book using nothing else, but there are some elements of Scrivener that I prefer for the writing process.

A5With Scrivener I create folders for each chapter, and then write scenes within a chapter. I can colour code scenes – for example, in The Back Road I coded scenes in relation to the level of tension. I could see when there were spots in which the tension dropped, and it gave me an opportunity to think about the scenes and how to ramp them up a notch.

Similarly, I used keywords extensively. The Back Road has a number of story threads, with huge potential to get lost! So each scene is given one of a number of keywords each of which relates to a thread. I can then search on the keywords, and find all the scenes, allowing me to read one storyline in complete isolation – a fantastic tool for checking consistency and story development. Scenes can be written in any order – once the structure is in place you can add a scene, move it around, put it in an ideas folder for later use – the options are endless. But with the structure in place, the writing can begin.

A8I could talk all day about the tools I use and how they help – but this is supposed to be an overview of how to get started. Remember, I am not for a moment suggesting this is the right way or the only way, but it might give you some ideas of where to start.

*   *   *

A15Rachel Abbott has written four psychological thrillers which, combined, have sold over one million copies. She self-published Only the Innocent in November 2011. It raced up the UK charts to reach the top 100 within 12 weeks and quickly hit the #1 spot in the Amazon Kindle chart (all categories) and remained there for four weeks. 

A10Only the Innocent was so successful that it was re-edited and the new version was launched in the US by Thomas and Mercer in paperback, audio, and Kindle versions on 5th February 2013, hitting the number one spot in the Kindle Store in August 2013. Her second book, The Back Road, was also published by Thomas and Mercer.

Her third book, Sleep Tight, was published in February 2014 and her newest, Stranger Child, was released last month.

A13Rachel Abbott was born just outside Manchester, England. She spent most of her working life as the Managing Director of an interactive media company, developing software and websites for the education market. The sale of that business enabled her to fulfil one of her lifelong ambitions – to buy and restore a property in Italy.

Rachel now lives in Alderney – a beautiful island off the coast of France, and is now able to devote time to her other love – writing fiction. For more information, see Rachel’s website, or follow her on Twitter.

Visit Rachel Abbott’s website at:  www.Rachel-Abbott.com

Like her on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RachelAbbott1Writer

Follow Rachel on Twitter:  @_RachelAbbott   https://twitter.com/_RachelAbbott

Buy her books:  http://www.amazon.com/Rachel-Abbott/e/B0068FBVCW