David Schwinghammer's Blog, page 24

TATIANA

Tatiana by Martin Cruz Smith

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


At the beginning of TATIANA, a bicycle racing interpreter who is conversant in several languages is murdered, but that’s not the case Arkady Renko is interested in. Journalist Tatiana Petrovna, a determined young woman bent on rooting out corruption in high places, falls from a sixth floor apartment, to her death and the police are convinced it was a suicide. Arkady doesn’t believe it.

Arkady Renko is pretty close to being clinically depressed. His adopted son Zhenya wants to join the army. Zhenya is a chess genius and Arkady is convinced he can do better; Arkady won’t sign the papers to allow Zhenya to enlist. Meanwhile Arkady’s on and off girlfriend, Anya, seems to determined to follow Tatiana’s dangerous mission as a journalist, flirting with a mafia boss.

The whole case revolves around a notebook left behind by the interpreter; it’s not in code; it seems to be a set of doodles the interpreter used to stimulate his memory about a job he’d been working on.

Meanwhile mafia leader Grisha Grigorenko is also murdered, and his son seems to think he should be the heir apparent. The interpreter murder, Tatiana’s so-called suicide and the mafia killing seem related. In Renko’s Russia, the mafia plays a much greater role than the media has led us to believe.

Arkady gets hold of the notebook, but can’t make much sense of it, but Zhenya takes it on as a challenge, especially after a young girl beats him at chess, and he wants to impress her.

Renko really doesn’t have any authority to investigate anything, but his alcoholic friend Victor, who like Sherlock Holmes, only gets high when he’s not on a case, reluctantly helps. They center on Kaliningrad where Tatiana’s sister lives. Kaliningrad is a dump, except for its depleted amber mines, and Arkady believes they have something to do with what‘s going on.

A good theme for this book would be “nothing is as it seems”; once we move toward the end, Martin Cruz Smith throws us a few curve balls, or twists in the literary vernacular. I’ve read all of the Arkady Renko mysteries, and this one moves along at a pretty rapid pace; there’s even room for optimism at the end, somewhat unusual for a Renko novel.



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Where to Find Ideas for Stories and Novels

Combing the Daily Newspaper for ideas: March 17, 2010



I’ve come up with some of my best ideas clipping the daily newspaper. I’ve written a novel, using the Jodi Huisentruit kidnapping as an inspiration. She was a TV anchorperson who was kidnapped in front of her apartment building at four-thirty in the morning. They never found her. I also found one about a guy who rides the freight trains every summer. He’s a perfectly normal guy otherwise. He just likes to hop the freights and go for a ride. I’m still working on that one. I’ve got the hobo vernacular down. There are books about that. Anyway here are some possibilities I found in today’s paper:



1. March Madness: On my football board, the guys are all talking about bracketology as if it were the stock market. Can you imagine a person who lives, breaths and eats sports? I know it’s been done in several movies, most notably “The Diner,” but it’s definitely not a cliché.



2. There’s some hypocrisy going on in the Republican party regarding Nancy Pelosi’s “Deemed passed” idea. Gingrich used it a lot more than the Democrats are. Maybe do this from a Congressional page’s point of view.



3. Lots of flood threats going on in Minnesota. Considering the earth quake in Haiti and the one in Chili, what would that be like? Fargo, North Dakota, seems to go through this every year. High school kids are excused from school to help sandbag. Knowing them, it must be like party time. Maybe not. Maybe they’re more serious than we think. Explore the issue.



4. Health care issue. I’m going through some stuff myself right now with arthritis in my neck. When did you first notice you were getting old? 22? 40? When you celebrated your silver wedding anniversary? When the kids flew the nest?



5. Doctor certified in new specialty. Sleep medicine specialty. This is in St. Cloud, Minnesota, population approx, 70,000. Narcolepsy is interesting for me. I once had a student who had it. Not being able to sleep must be hell.



6. Suicides in the Ivy league. “Cornell Takes Steps After Gorge Deaths.” Do you realize how hard it is to get into an Ivy League school? These are privileged kids with the world by the tail. What could provoke them, other than flunking out?



7. Dentist accused of assault and battery. He used paper clips instead of stainless steel posts inside the teeth of root canal patients. Isn’t root canal bad enough? Protagonist would be the patient with the paper clips.



8. Comics page. Danae in “Non Sequitor” gets detention for insisting that all boys are booger brains, including historical figures.



9. “Tiger Will Return for Masters.” Is there really such a thing as sexual addiction? Aren’t just about all guys addicted to sex?



10. “Brazen Conn. Warehouse Heist Nets 75 Million in Pills.” Thieves cut a hole in the roof of a warehouse, rappelled inside and scored one of the biggest hauls of its kind---antidepressants and other prescription drugs, most likely headed for overseas black market. Enough to fill a tractor trailer. What kind of mind would think this up? Definitely unique.

UNBROKEN

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


With UNBROKEN, author Laura Hillenbrand moves in a totally different direction from her best-selling blockbuster SEABISCUIT.

A bombardier in the Army Airforce before his plane was forced to ditch in the ocean, Louie Zamperini, spent forty-six days with two other airmen on a raft fighting off sharks and subsisting on rainwater, seabirds and the occasional fish. When they finally touched land, he became a prisoner in a number of Japanese POW camps, and he met his tormenter, Mutsuhiro Watanabe. Watanabe had heard of Louie's Olympic achievements and singled him out as an object of hatred.

Louie survived. Inspirational.









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How to write dialogue

Dialogue



1. Write like people talk. They use fragments, run-ons sentences, they interrupt each other, they change the subject. A possible field trip for you would be to go to a place where there are a lot of people and listen: a football game, the mall, a bar. Bring along a notebook and try to get a sense of how they talk.



2. Warning: Most conversation is stultifying boring; remember you’re writing fiction. Use the technique, but not the content: “How are you?” “I’m fine; how are you?” “I’m good, got a new leaf blower.” Establishing a conflict or a goal for your character early on in your scene will help your dialogue. A wife will give her husband the needle; a friend will tease his buddy about his lack of success with women.



3. Avoid long speeches. Try to write in rhythm. Robert B. Parker is really good at this. See his Jesse Stone novels. It works like this. One, two: a character talks, the other responds or at least nods his head. Save long speeches for scenes where they are absolutely necessary. Dialogue sequences should also be fairly short to avoid boring the reader.



4. I had a critique partner once who thought she was breaking new ground by using dialogue at the expense of narration. If that’s your thing, write a play. Mix it up with sequences of narration, active description (lots of action verbs and imagery) dialogue and action. Action should be on the heavy side.

Move your main character through the scene. He can be driving a car or just walking down the street, but move him through the scene as much as possible. You don’t want any talking heads.



5. Tag lines (he said, she said). Use “said” rather than synonyms for it; occasionally you can use something like “responded” but don’t make a habit of it. Readers don’t notice “said” but they sure do notice when something else is used, like “rebutted.” Fiction is a dream state of sorts and any fancy work wakes your reader up.



6. Beats: This is the action that goes with the tag lone. “Hi,” she said, turning in her chair to look at him. Don’t overdo the beats; they become monotonous if you use them with every snatch of dialogue; they also slow the pace.

7. Avoid using too many participial phrases (“ing” words that follow the tag line.) One every now and then is okay, but avoid using them on the same page.



8. Pace. For a past pace don’t use tag lines. Your reader will be able to figure out who’s talking by what the various characters say. For a slower pace use more tags and beats, maybe lengthen your sentences a bit.



9. Summary dialogue (Used to quicken pace. Be sure you have a good reason to use it, like avoiding boring the reader with mundane conversation.

Some editors don’t like to see summary dialogue at all.



10. Avoid dialect unless you’re really good at it. I’ve been driving myself crazy lately with Irish dialect. I found a site on the Internet that translates English into Irish, but it sounds awfully British to me. Anyway, odd spelling bugs your readers. You can tell your readers the character spoke with an Irish brogue or use the occasional Irish word like “paypul” instead of people.



11. Interior monologue. Your character is talking to himself in his head. Editors don’t like it. It’s kind of hard not to use this, especially if you’re writing in author limited point of view, but avoid it as much as possible.



Dave Schwinghammer's novel, SOLDIER'S GAP, is available

on Amazon.com.

How to Structure Your Book

The best way I've found is to map out my book on artists sketch pad paper. You want to aim at plot points. Your book is formatted in three acts. Act one is when you introduce your main characters, give them a setting and give them a problem or goal. Plot point one is around page seventy or seventy five when your main character sets out to accomplish his goal. Act two is about 150 pages long and plot point two is around page 140-150. That's where you add a new wrinkle or twist to throw off those inveterate readers, like me, who think they know who did it (if it's a mystery) or what's going to happen otherwise. Plot point three or Act Three happens around page 210 when you set up your climax. How long your climax lasts is up to you, but when it's over wrap it up pretty quickly, unless you think you need an epilogue to tell the reader what happened to the characters later. I love those. Now, you're going to write down the scenes you think you need on the sketch paper under each Act.

I tend to write twenty-page scenes, but that's just me. I include a lot of verisimilitude (research and active description) that makes the characters and the situation more real for me. While writing SOLDIER'S GAP, I read LIVING LIFE'S CIRCLE: Mescalero Apache Cosmovision, by Claire R. Farrer, which helped me with one of my main characters, Mingo Jones, the night deputy in Soldier, Minnesota. Mescaleros believe in ghosts, and SOLDIER'S GAP is kind of a ghost story. I did a lot of suspension of disbelief, so don't let that scare you. There's also a definite theme: it's about kids falling through the cracks and a kind of spiritual journey Deputy Sheriff Dave Jenkins goes through while chasing a killer.

Anyway, if you use this plot structure, you should have little problem with the first draft. I can write a first draft in a couple of months, if that long. This may explain James Patterson's publishing frenzy (not really). Rewriting takes me a lot longer. As I said I like to add verisimilitude, and I do that while I rewrite. I also read HELTER SKELTER while I was writing the first draft and rewriting. Olive Randall, one of the major characters, is a lot like the Manson girls, and I wanted to get her right.

It's hard to let go of your book, so you want to find some reliable readers who aren't too close to you or who aren't sycophants. You can find some pretty good ones on the internet, believe it or not.

Let it Marinate

I’ve wanted to be a writer ever since third grade when I put on a puppet show for my class. When I turned forty, I figured I better get it in gear. As a teacher, I had the summers off so I got out my legal pad and set out to write ten pages a day with a goal of finishing a first draft by the end of the summer. Amazingly, I stuck to it, sometimes scribbling twenty pages a day. I was basically winging it, giving my self a brief outline at the end of each day’s work, but when I finished, I had no idea how to fix what I had. The next year I bought an Apple 2C computer, which helped a lot, but I wound up typing rather than revising. I needed help, so I reluctantly paid the three hundred dollar fee the Scott Meredith Literary Agency charged for a critique. What the heck. What was more important than my lifelong ambition?

A couple of months later I got my critique. The first sentence was encouraging. “You are an uncommonly gifted author.” But the next twenty pages tore me a new one. I had no idea what a through line was. My novel was basically picaresque, whatever the heck that was. A lot of it didn’t sound like my novel, however. It was only later, when I started reading writing gurus like John Gardner that I realized that Meredith’s readers were using “boilerplate.” New authors make the same mistakes. Why not take a few shortcuts?

What I really needed was encouragement, and one sentence about being uncommonly talented wasn’t enough. I didn’t know about writers’ groups and would have assumed that they were more experienced than I was anyway, so I put everything on hold until I retired from teaching. It was then I discovered writers’ conferences. I went to one at Splitrock on the University of Minnesota Duluth campus,, one in Rapid City, South Dakota, and another in Iowa City, what I thought was the famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Most the people I met there were even less experienced than I was, so they weren’t too helpful. All of these workshops also used the same format: the coordinator would make an assignment and the next day mostly everybody would read aloud and get peer critiques. It’s hard to follow along, even when you have a hard copy which most often we didn’t. Probably the most helpful thing I found was a book entitled, THE WEEKEND NOVELIST by Robert Ray. It helped me get to know my characters and outline my novel before I started writing. It’s still the best writers’ book I’ve found and I’ve read dozens as a member of the WRITER’S DIGEST BOOK CLUB.

Okay, so when I retired I started writing with a passion. I finished another novel, SOLDIER’S GAP, and rewrote it a couple of dozen times before I sent to a freelance editor, William Greenleaf, whom I found at the back of the Writers’ Digest magazine. He was great. He did a page by page outline of what was good and what was not so good, with just the right balance of encouragement and criticism. I also tried the Loft, a writers’ help group in the Twin Cities, and finally, Dave King, a freelance editor who wrote SELF-EDITING FOR FICTION WRITERS. Dave and I did a partial line edit.

By the time I was ready to submit to agents and editors, most publishers had stopped taking unsolicited (over the transom) manuscripts. You had to have an agent, and agents want manuscripts that will sell. You can find the legitimate ones in NOVEL AND SHORT STORY WRITERS’ MARKET. Never, I repeat never, look for an agent on the internet. I sent off about a hundred queries with only a few nibbles. Most didn’t like the psychic element in my novel, not that there’s that much of it.

Then along came e-books and I thought I had a shot since Sara Anne Freed, an editor at Mysterious Press, had been reading my work with encouraging feedback. She recommended Time Warner e-book imprint iPublishing. Somehow I wound up submitting my book to a company called iPublisher, now known as Bookpublisher.com. You guessed it. It was a self-publishing outfit like iUniverse, and it cost me some heavy bucks. But I wanted to see my book in print, and I wanted to go through the process of editing, picking out a cover, checking galleys, and so forth. It was fun. The problem was, at that time, was that you don’t get any promotional help. I got exactly one professional review. I also managed to scrounge up two signing sessions at bookstores, where I sold a whopping dozen books, about a dozen more than I thought I would. Bookpublisher.com did put my book on Amazon.com and on BarnesandNobel.com, where it still resides today. I even managed to earn a four-and-a-half star rating with nine reviews. one recent. I sure could use a few more. Hint, hint.

Since then I’ve written five more novels and about thirty short stories (available on authors den) mostly written for WRITERS’ DIGEST contests, and I’ve been working on a new novel entitled, STRANGERS ARE FROM ZEUS, some of which is posted on authors.den.

I ‘ve been through some down times, mostly when I thought I had an agent, or when some editor thought it was helpful to denigrate my work. (That’ll put a crimp in your style.) I guess I’d like to close with a pep talk. Never ever give up, and it’s surprising how good some of the stuff you write is that you thought was total garbage, if you just give it a chance to marinate.