Black Cat Weekly #15

THE WRITING WORKSHOP, by Janice Law Trecker

THE WRITING WORKSHOP,

by Janice Law Trecker“Just to recapitulate, gentlemen. Last time we discussed ‘finding your topic’ and ‘writing what you know.’ I trust you’ve been thinking along those lines. Yes, Tommy?”

“Pharmaceuticals,” he said.

“Excellent. And timely. Timely is good. Martin?”

“Insurance.” He gave a little smirk.

“Insurance is maybe tougher but can be, can be.”

“At the right price,” he said. “Especially health insurance.”

There was general laughter at this and I had to admit that insurance was timely, too. The suggestions went around the room, and, as so often, I remembered my own time in a writing workshop, the never-to-be-forgotten, two-day “So You Want to Write Mysteries” program sponsored by our local university. I think I can say that workshop changed my life, that everything that has happened subsequently unfolded from those classes.

You probably find that incredible. Teaching rarely obtains the respect great art deserves, but I often think back to those two days when the secrets of the business were first opened to me. I pass them on now, and I’ve discovered an unforeseen aptitude for teaching—even with less than promising students.

Finding Your Topic, Developing Your Voice, Mastering the Classic Plot Structures, Keeping the Action Going, Snappy Dialogue, A Touch of Atmosphere: I get nostalgic just looking over the syllabus and remembering a summer day with college girls in light dresses and tiny shorts passing beyond the windows, leafy shadows drifting across the floor, our instructors defying the heat at podium or board.

They all had funny stories about odd characters destined to appear in their novels, contretemps with editors, or the disasters of the dreaded (and longed for) book tour. I hung on every word, although I already had a few short stories published locally and a novel under my belt—where, alas, it remained, despite encouragement from both professional and amateur readers.

I already knew how to do Snappy Dialogue and the importance of adding A Touch of Atmosphere, never mind Keeping the Action Going. What I wanted was The Secret of Publication and, voila, on the last afternoon I got it.

Destiny, surely, because I nearly cut the class to make an early start home. The instructor, gray, fat, and self-assured, had done A Touch of Atmosphere earlier without really exciting my interest. But she was well published, and the wrap up session seemed like the best place to ask the question that was on my mind and on, I suspect, the minds all the other attendees: how do I get published? I put up my hand.

At first she gave the standard answers: write a good book, learn to sell it and yourself, network, network, network. Then, in almost a throwaway line, she solved my dilemma. I can still see her sitting at the instructor’s metal desk—alone of all the presenters she never hefted her considerable bulk from the seat. She had protruding blue eyes behind big glasses with red frames, more than the start of a whisker, an unfortunate haircut, and an even more unfortunate permanent. Her jowls moved when she spoke and, though it was against state law and university policy, she chain-smoked throughout the session and dared anyone to object.

Yet this frumpish sibyl foretold my future in one sentence. “Of course,” she said as the session was winding down, “you’ve got to find a sympathetic editor. You can write a terrific book, best in the world, but if you don’t find the right editor, forget it.”

“And how do you find the right editor?”

“You keep trying and looking and sending stuff out. That’s all you can do. You can hardly knock them off and replace them.”

I joined the laugher in the room.

“Though editors,” she added, “can be among the lower life forms.”

More laughter. We exited on this note to sunshine and Frisbee throwing undergrads and, in my case, to what was going to be a whole different life than my current one as office manager for a big septic system installer.

* * * *

I didn’t realize that immediately. I wrote another novel, incorporating everything I had learned about Finding Your Topic, Developing Your Voice, Mastering the Classic Plot Structures, Keeping the Action Going, Snappy Dialogue, and A Touch of Atmosphere. The book was good, too, and I think I can say without contradiction that my knowledge of septic systems and the excavation of drain fields added an unusual dimension to the plot. I sent it off with high hopes and, after a handful of rejections, I secured, I thought, the interest of a famous editor.

I went to New York to meet him. I sometimes wonder if everything would have been different had I remained in Connecticut and conducted the whole business by email and phone. But I went in person, seduced by the glamour of the New York publishing business, the charm of meeting a real editor, the cachet of venturing ‘into the city’ on editorial business.

Not, as it turned out, the best idea. The editor, Simmons Loftus III, famous and experienced, was craggy of feature and cranky of demeanor, handling half a dozen extraneous matters during our brief meeting. Though he conceded that my work showed talent, he concluded by regretting that I had misinterpreted his letter of encouragement: There would be no contract.

I was stunned. I had incautiously let it be known that I would be arranging for the publication of my novel. In addition to disappointment, I was so angry and humiliated that I could not immediately face the train home. Instead, I wandered around midtown, passing stores of every shape, variety and price; little sandwich kiosks and white cloth restaurants; offices, seedy and shiny; posters and billboards and ticket outlets; energetic sidewalk vendors, fanatic evangelists, and bored souls handing out ads for clubs, for bargains, for services of every imaginable sort.

I went far enough so that I realized I would have to take the subway back to Grand Central, and, without realizing it, I entered the same station that I had exited so hopefully earlier in the day on the way to see “my” editor. Down the dirty stairs with a flood of workers, school children, shoppers with bags, mothers with strollers; through the turnstile, down another flight and over to the downtown line. Anxious not to miss the express back to Connecticut, I pressed close to the edge, determined to be first into the car.

A light down the tunnel, a roar, and a draft of hot air, and then, among the crush to my left, a tweed jacket, a craggy profile, a briefcase no doubt full of favored manuscripts –“my” editor. The train was almost upon us, its light like a Cyclops eye, when I swung my hip like a hockey player and knocked Simmons Loftus and all his numerals onto the line.

A scream, a screech of brakes, a thud, white sparks.

“Someone’s fallen!” I shouted and my surprise was genuine. I had been standing there, admittedly full of anger, and then, like a spark from a Leyden jar, light and action and a deafening, unintelligible roar. Only half conscious of what I was doing, I stepped backwards into the crowd and momentarily found myself at the stair, still thronged with descending passengers. Behind me, emergency personnel rushed back and forth along the platform, and a voice from somewhere in the furthest reaches of the Bronx urged calm over the P.A.

I joined a group turned back from the platform by an alert subway policewoman and went complaining up the stairs with the rest. Out onto the street, a clear sky was darkening over the skyscrapers, and I made my train in time.

When I left Metro North at my stop, the now toxic glamour of Manhattan’s towers and its dark subway tunnels was replaced by green lawns and suburban cars. I was in another life, and I could read the accounts of Simmons Loftus III’s tragic tumble with something like indifference.

Death by misadventure seemed to be the opinion, and I couldn’t help coveting Death by Misadventure for a title. I felt I’d earned it. Still, the moment on the platform might have remained an anomaly, a moment in a parallel universe, if I had not received a letter two months later from Loftus’s successor who “really liked my novel” and who had “decided to take a chance” and offer me a contract.

The book came out a year later—Underground. Perhaps you’ve read it. It did all right but would have done better with a stronger editor, who was better able to push for resources and publicity within the firm—something for future consideration.

Still the success, even modest as it was, led me to think that crime pays, and there was another benefit; I’d expanded my range. Write What You Know is the first law of composition, and I could now say I knew homicidal anger and the surprise of violence and the way emotion discharges in unforeseen ways. My next novel was praised for its “psychological realism,” and I began writing stories with a darker tint.

I liked them a lot, but I still couldn’t crack the best anthologies. Another long time editor of great eminence and set opinions blocked my way. I met him at a cocktail party soon after my second novel came out. He was a jolly, pompous chap who knew everyone and called all his favorites by their first names. He talked to me while scanning the crowd and nearly knocked me flat when he lunged for someone of greater celebrity.

No joy there! Unfortunately for him, he was a sailor with a little ketch anchored at a Connecticut marina. I’m always surprised that people trust themselves to wave and water when there’s so much that can go wrong: leaks and engine failures and erratic signals. He ventured out one day before a storm and had the misfortune to lose his engine just when the winds made sailing impossible and he needed horsepower the most. A real shame.

There were questions raised, as he was known to be meticulous about keeping the boat in repair. The mechanic who serviced the engine swore it had all been in order, and subsequently it was discovered that someone – the beloved ‘person or persons unknown’—had tampered with the fuel line.

There was a good deal of outrage at this, although from a professional point of view, I’m sure he’d have been fascinated. I certainly was. And talk about A Touch of Atmosphere! There is something about fog as the old gothic writers knew full well. Mist rising off rivers and inlets, the warning horn in the distance, the soft plash of a kayak paddle, the scrape as it comes alongside a moored sailboat. Yes, one can go a long way with A Touch of Atmosphere, and I soon found that I was introducing river and ocean scenes and working up the effects of light through water vapor.

I felt something else, more reprehensible but understandable, I think, quite understandable: a certain joy in a job well done. That the famous anthologist was replaced by a hot younger writer who was no more susceptible to my oeuvre than her predecessor was annoying but not as devastating as you might imagine.

Instead of stewing about wasted effort and neglected stories, I began devising little scenarios of doom for her. Some of the more fanciful eventually made their way into print with titles like Death Under Pressure (catastrophe in a car crushing plant) and Mourning Becomes Her (a strangling in the Civil War era).

That was when I really mastered the Classic Plot Structures. It is, as I often tell my class, a matter of relating your own interests and motivations to a sturdy formal structure. And, though I don’t often mention this, the experience of plotting someone’s demise in reality has a powerful and salutary effect on one’s literary development. It really does.

But let us not neglect Anthologist the Younger. I certainly did not. Those of you with intellectual penetration will have noticed my preference for accidents. Chance rules our lives, and a certain amount of flexibility about outcomes seems to me only wise. I set to studying my new target in earnest.

This was an urban woman—no boats, no foggy mornings along the river, no slippery marina docks. The concrete jungle then? But no. She lacked vices that I could discover, possessed a fine address, and had a habit of calling taxis—no hot subway tunnels for this lassie, either.

I was forced to place my hopes on the perils of fitness. I’d seen her photos and, even adding ten years (and who but the very young publishes an up to date author picture?) I guessed this was someone who exercised. Perhaps she ran (lonely park roads beckoned) or swam (a multitude of watery possibilities) or worked on the weight machines (my mechanical fingers twitched).

Fortunately, she had a blog, convinced, as so many are, that the world was waiting for such ephemera as the tantrums of her hairdresser, the death of her Yorkie, her opinion on the best pizza in NYC, or her recipe for elderberry wine. I had a nostalgic moment thinking about Arsenic and Old Lace and the possibilities of poison, when I noticed an entry on pink running shoes. And, better yet, her ambition to run a half marathon. This meant training. And training meant opportunity!

With the improvements in my literary fortunes, I found myself in the city fairly often, and I formed the habit of buying street food and lunching in the park before strolling back to the train through her neighborhood. I spotted Anthologist the Younger a couple of times, groceries or flowers in hand, and I can assure you her photos were at least twenty years old. But fit, I could see that. So a runner, who trained early? Late? I needed to find out, and I booked hotels for a couple of weekends.

Every one of us has a weakness—I often discuss the importance of character flaws in my class. Even the super hero—or, increasingly to modern taste, the super heroine—needs a flaw, little touch of ordinary humanity or, at least, some habit that makes them vulnerable. Hers was a taste for early morning runs. Fog and mist after all; my heart rose as I made my plans.

What allows you to hang around a park without arousing comment? Exercise of some sort was the obvious possibility, but I detest unnecessary exertion. I acquired a pair of binoculars, added a Peterson’s bird guide, and set out for an early morning ramble.

From then on it was a matter of Keeping the Action Going, as you can read in my novel Tripwire. A very neat job, both in the park and on the page, so to speak. I do believe that Anthologist the Younger marked a turning point in my life, the moment when I moved from action for the sake of my career to action for its own sake. I think so.

As I am sure this particular class would tell you, action on the page cannot compete with action in real life, where plot and action and atmosphere cohere, producing not just One’s Own Voice but the imprint of one’s whole self. Perhaps you can understand how action became irresistible, even as my growing success made it unnecessary.

And then, a mistake. I admit, a mistake. A slick new mystery magazine began with a singularly obtuse editor. We’d exchanged heated emails and then words at a mystery writers’ conference. Two mistakes, in truth, which I shortly compounded with a third. I put her under close surveillance, a preliminary move, you understand, strictly preliminary, that nonetheless led to an incident and my present situation.

Though loath to correct anything connected with the never to be forgotten So you Want to Write Mysteries syllabus, I’ve decided another topic is needed: Keeping the Boundary, as in the boundary between fantasy and reality. I think I shall add that to this course, perhaps calling it the Limits of Mystery. Perhaps I shall.

“Tommy?” Where was I, oh, voice, as in Developing Your Voice. I realized that Tommy had been reading for a few minutes. “Just the last few lines again,” I said.

“So he says to me, he says, ‘I’ll tear your head off, sucker.’ And I says, ‘I got an answer to that,’ and I plugs him with the .38.”

Which, though it omitted some of Tommy’s more vigorous adjectives, captured his voice very nicely. “Good pulp style,” I said, and I was set to elaborate before I saw the guard make the time sign as through the reinforced glass of the door.

“That’s it for today, Gentlemen. Next week, Classic Plot Structures.”

Their folding chairs scraped and rattled, steel door clanked open, and we exited single file toward the cells, as good an illustration as you’re going to get, I think, of my additional topic, The Limits of Mystery.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Janice Law is an Edgar nominated and a Lambda award winning novelist, as well as short fiction writer whose stories appear in AHMM, EQMM, BCMM, and Sherlock Holmes Mystery magazine. Her most recent novels are Mornings in London (mysteriouspress.com), and Homeward Dove (Wildside Press) and she will have a story in the upcoming Best Mystery Stories of   2021. Visit her web site: www.janicelaw.com