THE WRITER’S COOKBOOK (Part 4 of 4)
and
COVERING THE STORY (Part 1)

by James Lincoln Warren

Here’s the final part of The Writer’s Cookbook. Afterwards, I begin commenting on my recent good fortune in getting the cover story on this month’s AHMM by describing the genesis of the story.

Part IV: The Last Chapter

I mentioned at the beginning of this series that I don’t believe in a cookbook approach to writing, but that there are useful metaphors in cooking that can help teach writing. Metaphor in many ways is the central issue in all fiction that aspires to be more than simple narrative. But all metaphors, no matter how useful, can be stretched to the breaking point—and one should never confuse the model with the reality.

Writing is not cooking.

The purpose of a recipe is to reproduce exactly the same dish every time you cook it. A real chef doesn’t just follow a recipe, but creates it, and then moves on to the next dish. A writer obviously cannot reproduce the same dish over and over again to a nice exactitude; if he did he’d be a plagiarist. (Although looking at some series authors, it seems they do do their damnedest to repeat themselves.) The lesson here is never use the same recipe twice.

More importantly, a “cookbook” approach to teaching writing leaves the impression that a story is nothing more than the sum of its parts. This is not true, even of cooking. That’s like mixing the ingredients of a cake, including the frosting and birthday candles, together in a bowl and calling it a cake.

What I’m driving at here is that an analytical approach to writing has its pitfalls. Analysis is defined by the OED as “the resolution or breaking up of anything complex into its various simple elements, the opposite process to synthesis; the exact determination of the elements or components of anything complex (with or without their physical separation).”

Whenever we talk of ingredients or discrete techniques, we are taking an analytical approach. Analysis can be very useful—especially if it tells us what’s missing—but it is not creative by its very nature. It consists of taking things apart, not putting them together. As the OED says, it is the opposite process to synthesis.

And synthesis, my gentle reader, is what makes a writer. In the end, the parts matter much less than the whole. And that’s where the ineffable comes in. If you could explain it, it wouldn’t be necessary to do it. The only sources for skill in artistic synthesis are taste, talent, and experience. Learning to write well in many ways is simply—simply! ha!—a process of refining what’s already there. How do you explain a sense of drama? What makes a phrase beautiful? How irony can be sad and funny simultaneously? Try to take these things apart and they cease to exist.

So use the cookbook all you want, but don’t expect it to turn you into an Escoffier.

To really write well, you’ve got to leave the cookbook on the shelf.

Covering the Story

No one could have been more surprised than I was to learn that “When the Wind Blows”, my most recent sale to AHMM, was selected as a cover story. The story itself has a strange history, and its eventual success demonstrates the absolute truth in the old cliché, “You never can tell.”

Here’s how it happened.

Some time ago, I wrote a novel featuring my 18th century detective Alan Treviscoe. (For an excerpt of the still unpublished novel, check out “The Sack ’Em Up Men”.) My agent asked me to get as many blurbs as from as many prominent crime fiction authors as I could to assist him in pitching the book. One of the writers I asked was Michael Connelly. Mike graciously agreed, but gave up after the first chapter–“I didn’t get it,” he said. “This isn’t really my kind of fiction at all. I’m strictly contemporary.”

Of course I could hardly expect him to blurb the book after a reaction like that. Mike Connelly is one of the most generous and big-hearted writers in our genre, and my mild disappointment in not getting a high profile blurb was balanced by the fact that I would never, ever, ask a gent like Mike to compromise his standards. What stung much more than not getting the blurb was the fact that I had failed utterly to engage Mike as a reader.

Then came the announcement that Mike was going to be the editor of a cop-themed MWA anthology. One of Mike’s favorite quotes is Joe Wambaugh’s observation that what’s more interesting than the cop working on the case is the case working on the cop. I also knew that Mike was inspired to become a writer of crime fiction by his exposure to Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye when he was in college.

So I decided to write a story for an audience of one. All I knew was that it had to feature a cop whose life had been taken over by a crime and that I wanted it to evoke Chandler.

The second part was easy. I had recently re-read Chandler’s classic “Red Wind”, which opens thus:

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.

I live in Los Angeles and I knew exactly what Chandler was talking about. Then I remembered another famous piece of advice: good artists borrow, but great ones steal–by the way, this has been attributed to both Marc Chagall and Igor Stravinsky, which makes me wonder which of them stole it from the other, but either way the advice is still good.

So I stole the Santa Ana.

Next week, I start killing babies.