SOME BIBELOTS AND BAUBLES

by James Lincoln Warren

Here, completely free, are some nuggets of advice for aspiring short story writers of crime fiction. These are all little things, but then again, a fatal bullet is a little thing, too. Yeah, I know that free advice is worth exactly what one pays for it, to wit, nothing at all, so I appeal to you as a reader rather than as a writer, letting you know what will stop me dead in my tracks.

Don’t let your research show.

Sometimes the most fun I have in writing a story is doing research for it. I’ll always find much more than I need, and being of a somewhat curious nature, by which I mean inquisitive rather than eccentric, although, come to think of it, the latter sense is pretty accurate, too—anyway, being of a somewhat curious nature, I am frequently deeply fascinated by what I find, and feel the strong temptation to share all my new-found and riveting knowledge with my audience. But I restrain myself. Usually.

It’s a cardinal rule of writing short stories that only those things essential to the tale should be told. What makes this particularly true of research is that research is like a brassiere.

What?

Well, its purpose is to give support to the story, but you don’t want the straps showing. When it’s really standing up on the job, it’s invisible. Otherwise, it’s distracting as hell.

Gratuitous sex and violence are, well, gratuitous.

Now, I’m not saying that a story should never have any sex or violence in it, but I promise you that explicit violence in a story won’t affect you as strongly as real violence will, and explicit sex in a story is never as much fun as the real thing, although the author is very likely to lie about how it is. But a good short story doesn’t have room for anything gratuitous.

You, see, what’s interesting about visceral experiences in story-telling isn’t the effect on the reader, but rather the effect on the characters—and it’s the characters that really affect the reader. And did I mention that only those things essential to the tale should be told?

Gratuitous exposition and description are also gratuitous, don’t ye know, although they’re less controversial, I suppose, because they are BORING, which is rarely the case with sex and violence. But on another tack, when something is present only to titillate, we usually call that pornography.

If you use a thesaurus to find a synonym, look up the synonym in the dictionary before you use it.

The sad truth is that synonyms are rarely 100% interchangeable. I recently read a story where the author used the word consanguinity in lieu of relationship to describe the confluence of a number of factors in determining an outcome. This is a misusage.

Consanguinity is a type of relationship, but in its technical sense it means a relationship by blood—the relationship between you and your relatives. Metaphorically, then, it means a relationship by way of descent from a common origin, the relationship between things that share similar characteristics, rather than the relationship of things that interact. You and your cousin may be friends, but being cousins and being friends are two different kinds of relationship—only the former is consanguineal. The author could have use marriage as a metaphor to describe different factors working together and gotten away with it, but in the context used, consanguinity made no sense.

Likewise, for example, with using parting to mean leaving—one person can just get up and leave, but for that person to part, he has to part with something else: you can’t say, “My love, I must part.” It has to be, “My love, we must part.”

Not only is it not necessary to have a twist ending, usually it’s a bad idea.

A story should stand on its own merits. The most frequent problem with twist endings is that the vast majority of the time, the reader can see it coming. He will be thinking, “Surely the ending won’t be that obvious, will it?” and then be pissed off that he wasted his time slogging through the whole story to get there when it is.

Unless you are Jeffery Deaver, O. Henry, John M. Floyd, Rob Lopresti, or a few others I can think of, you should not attempt this at home without professional supervision. Most really good short stories don’t have surprise endings. Name me one Sherlock Holmes story that does.

Stories about the commission of a crime, instead of how it is solved, are generally dull, no matter how interesting you found writing them.

It’s a lot easier to commit a crime than to solve one. By extension, it’s a lot easier to write about committing a crime than writing about solving one. Taking the easy way out just means you didn’t work very hard at it, and that usually shows. (I make an exception of capers, which are engaging because the crime must be so fiendishly clever.)

Now don’t get me wrong: there are all kinds of good straight crime stories out there, especially if you are James M. Cain or Lawrence Block, but most such stories are crap. And the worst of them are usually revenge stories—revenge as a motive is mostly BORING, because it is obsessively monotonous. Every good revenge story I can think of actually hangs its hat on some other quality of the story than its protagonist’s motive.

And last but not least . . .

Don’t ever begin your story with, “It was a dark and stormy night …”

It is not clever, even if it’s supposed to be funny. Nothing you can write after it is going to save your story. It is categorically not possible to write a good story that begins with that phrase unless you are Snoopy, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, or Madeleine L’Engle, and none of you is. Neither am I, of course.

Clichés at any time are bad, but to use one to introduce yourself to your reader is like having eye-watering B.O. when you meet someone for your first date. No matter how charming, witty, brilliant, and beautiful you are the rest of the evening, there is nothing that can rescue you from that devastating first impression.

Look, I don’t care if your story actually begins with a dark and stormy night or not, but if it does, make your point another way. Say, “Lightning flashed, limning the horizon against the black sky,” if you want. Or maybe, “The rain pelted the roof, and looked like it would keep coming until morning.” Anything but those deadly seven words. Please.