The Writer’s Predicament

I said I was going to tell you about agents and publishing companies and such today, but before I do that, I want to go into the process of writing “An Innocent Client” in a little more detail.

James Scott Bell has a book out called “Plot and Structure,” and in it, he talks about the LOCK system. L is for Lead, O is for Objective, C is for Conflict, and K is for Knockout. His system works for me.

My first predicament was to come up with a Lead. I knew I wanted to write a mystery/thriller that involved a lawyer as the lead. Male or female? I chose male for the obvious reason that it would be easier for me to write from that perspective. Name? Age? Appearance? Background? Family? I decided on a handsome forty-year-old named Joe Dillard. He started out as Joe Bob Cooter, but I decided that was too hokey, and I eventually settled on Dillard. I wanted to make him likeable but frustrated, haunted by something in his past. I wanted him to be a good man in a bad world. I wanted him to be a dedicated father and husband, a hard worker, an idealist who had become jaded by the criminal justice system. But the most important predicament I had to solve was the question every author must answer: What does he want?

That question leads to Objective. What is your lead character’s objective? Getting a pizza for dinner is an objective, but it won’t sustain a novel. You have to come up with something that will hold your reader’s interest. The objective I came up with for Joe in “An Innocent Client” was that before he quit practicing law, he wanted to defend just one client who was truly innocent.

Next comes Conflict, which drives the difficult middle part of the novel. I tortured poor old Joe. His mother had Alzheimer’s and didn’t recognize him half the time, his sister was a drunk and an addict who was in and out of jail and Joe felt responsible for her, there was some pretty damning evidence against the client he thought was innocent, he was being stalked by the son of his client’s victim, another of his clients escaped from prison and committed a murder. On top of all this, he was up against a system that included arrogant judges and district attorneys and a crooked cop. It got to the point where I actually started feeling sorry for the guy, but I didn’t let that stop me. I just kept pouring it on, and if you write fiction, you have to do the same. Become a sadist. Have no mercy on your lead.

Once I got all these things going – I refer to it as spinning plates – then I had to figure out ways to resolve them and eventually go to the last step, which Mr. Bell calls the Knockout. You have to knock the reader out with a solid ending to the chin. You have to get all your spinning plates down off the sticks without breaking any of them. In “An Innocent Client,” I did that by resolving the conflict between Joe and his sister and then using the sister to turn the tables on the prosecution at the trial of Joe’s not-so-innocent client. I also used a devious but utterly likable woman named Erlene Barlowe to turn the tables on the crooked cop. She fought fire with fire and it worked. So did the LOCK system.

During all of this, I had to think about setting and tone and pacing and dialogue and points of view. I made hundreds of choices, solved hundreds of predicaments, during the writing of that novel. It consumed me for a year and a half, but that’s what it takes. I’ve written five full length novels and two novellas now, and it’s the same with every one of them. I wake up thinking about the story and the characters and I go to sleep thinking about the story and the characters. I even dream about them sometimes.

Besides story and characters and setting and tone and pacing and points of view, I thought a lot about themes. What kind of messages did I want to send to readers of this book? Telling a compelling tale is only part of the process. Getting a message or two or ten across without being obvious about it helps you connect with readers on a deeper level.

There were a lot of thematic elements to “An Innocent Client:” the injustice, or at least the arbitrary nature, of the criminal justice system is a theme that runs through all of my work, but I also dabble in man’s inhumanity to man, the dangers of extremism, the beauty of love and hope and forgiveness and redemption, the dangers of putting too much trust in government, and the arbitrary and terrifying nature of sociopathology. Some readers get it, some don’t, but it’s my opinion that whether readers “get it” isn’t nearly as important as whether they enjoyed the story. Telling a compelling story is Objective Number One. Keep that in mind, and it’ll serve you well.

Okay, so there’s a mini-seminar in the craft of fiction writing. Next time, I’ll get to those agents and publishers and Hollywood producers.   It’s not glamorous. As a matter of fact, it can be downright ugly.