Ye who read Criminal Brief, please welcome Angela Zeman as our new regular Saturday correspondent. I could wax long on her many virtues, but shall instead refer you to her CrimeSpace profile, as well as her website, which should amply satisfy the curious. I speak for the entire Criminal Brief crew in pronouncing our delight in having her become One of Us. –JLW

FIGHTING OVER THE GUN

by Angela Zeman

Greetings to the SS community! Thank you, Jim, for inviting me to join your crew at Criminal Brief, what a great compliment to be included! (Is grammar expertise a requirement? If so, Jim might have to rescind his invitation.)

Not long ago, I finished a story that had been giving me abrasions of the brain for some weeks. After uncountable rewrites, I finally passed it on to my ‘first reader’, my husband, Barry Zeman, to start the battles we always have when he edits my work. (When I finish training him, he’s going to be a terrific editor.) He writes non-fiction exclusively, so really, I’m asking a lot from him to do this. But the argument we ended on lingered in my mind.

He requested I state clearly that the bad guy fired his gun. I had written that the protagonist found the gun later. My view was the police (NYPD), being shrewd types, would swiftly deduce (using information I won’t include here) the bad guy had taken a shot at the good guy. I’m being vague on purpose—the story will publish in a few months. Don’t want to reveal any spoilers.

Barry’s view was that I must fire the gun right out in print, to make sure the reader understood what happened. He insisted it would be a mistake to believe all readers would conclude the gun had been fired just because it made sense to me—and the cops. He insisted that if the reader didn’t catch on, the protagonist would seem like a murderer, not someone who acted in self-defense—thus blowing my ending.

Just to clarify, this story (like most I create) is a whodunit, so detail means everything. His point was important.

I thought it over, and then capitulated. I fired the gun, but my way. Instead of taking his advice to say, using non-cliché words, ‘a shot rang out,’ I imagined instead what my protagonist would see, feel, hear, and think. Well, it was dark and snowing. The protagonist literally saw the bad guy reach out as if offering something to her, and she saw a flash. A flash in the dark, isn’t that a fired gun? That’s as far as I would compromise.

Even worse, (in Barry’s eyes) the protagonist made serious blunders. She might not get out of this situation unscathed—I left that conclusion deliberately undrawn. Life is full of messy endings, why couldn’t I put one in a story? Well, Barry likes happy tidy endings, and doesn’t everyone? Still, I decided to stand by the vague uneasiness of my ending. Now my fingers are crossed that this story will pass the real editor’s scrutiny. (I’ll rewrite willingly, if it comes to that.)

You’d be surprised how fiercely we battled to defend our respective points of view. A useful battle, as it turned out. By listening to myself argue, I came to understand that without conscious decision, I had put all action in the form of what was observed or experienced. Almost no exposition, except for one paragraph of background information.

Here’s my point: until forced to defend my choices, I had no idea I was counting on the reader to draw conclusions to make sense out of the story. I learned a lot.

Will the reader be entertained? I hope so! Regardless of writing mechanics, my one fixed goal is to never bore.

Sounds familiar. “Never bore, Lenore, never bore.” Never mind.

Sometimes I come up with ideas and can’t make them happen on the page. Too vague, too complicated, or maybe I just can’t line up the right words. But so much fun! Like a playground on paper!