Ray-Anne Carr

Yes, I know this blog relates to the creation of Crime Fiction, but since I am an academic, I feel it is my duty to take every opportunity to learn.

‘THE EVIL OVERLORD DEVISES A PLOT’
Has several lists of key features which should be observed when creating a compelling plot.

For example:

1. If you try hard enough, you can outrun an explosion.
2. If your town is threatened by an imminent natural disaster or killer beast, the mayor’s first concern will be the tourist trade or his forthcoming art exhibition.
3. Natural disasters only occur after the local mayor scoffs at the possibility.
4. If an expert makes a prediction and is disbelieved, then it will come to pass exactly as he predicted. If he makes a prediction and is believed, it won’t happen.
5. Women staying in a haunted house should investigate any strange noises while wearing their most revealing underwear.
6. Women’s skin and hair can’t be damaged by natural disasters, though their clothing can be shredded — except for the bits required for minimal decency, which are made from completely indestructible fabric.
7. If a man and a woman are exposed to the same conditions and the same environment, the man will need to wear more clothing than the woman.
8. If a man and a woman meet under circumstances under which any two normal people would instantly hate each other, they will marry before the picture is over.
9. Deadly reptiles will always attack a woman first, even if she’s in the presence of thirty men.
10. Women are immortal unless they take off their shirts or they’re ugly.
11. If a woman takes a bath, bubbles will cover the naughty bits. If she takes a shower and reveals her naughty bits, she will die.
12. If a blonde and a brunette are in equal peril, the brunette will die.
13. White characters have the best survival rate.
14. High class strippers with a heart of gold can will, if the plot demands it, turn out to have specialized technical skills and abilities.
15. Most human action is initiated by shy loners.
16. All bombs are fitted with electronic timing devices with large red readouts so you know exactly when they’re going to go off.
17. It’s easy to pull the pin on a grenade with your teeth.
18. An explosive device capable of leveling a large office building will fit inside a toolbox or small backpack.
19. Potentially fatal attacks are always preceded by a false alarm a few seconds earlier.
20. Any lock can be picked by a credit card or a paper clip in seconds — unless it’s the door to a burning building with a child trapped inside.

There are lots more here: http://www.sff.net/paradise/movies.html

Warning - these can be compulsive for checklists.

 I am editing my current WIP and find this technique useful when I get stuck. It is clearly designed to work for a partial where you already have a story flow worked out, and you already know what each chapter has to do to earn its place in your novel - or screenplay.

Questions you have to ask about the scene.

• Who is my viewpoint character or characters?
• What does the hero want in this scene? Why are they here? Why now?
• Who, or what, is going to block that want? How? = This links to All levels of Internal and External Conflict for that character. Psychological, Personal, Social, Physical.
•  What are the turning points? How does the scene move and churn?
• How does the whole scene turn from start to end?
• What is the purpose of this scene - does it reveal something about the plot or the character?

Example.
The character - let’s call him Jake, is driving in winter in Alaska on a snow covered road in a hire car. Jake is on is way to his daughter’s 16th birthday party. He is divorced. He promised to be there and has flown in from Mexico just for the occasion. [ goal, motivation, internal conflict, location, timing.]

It is dusk, there are no road lights. A deer runs out from the dense forest, and he hits it. Car wrecked. Deer dead. He has no mobile phone signal. There is no other traffic on the road. He will have to walk to the ski lodge where his ex wife runs with her new husband. The big shot entrepreneur. [ Turning point = physical and environmental conflict, internal conflict]

He starts walking in light snow. Dressed for a party.

A car headlights are behind him. Great. A lift. Only the car speeds past, forcing him off the road and into the snow. [ scene has turned from comfort of car seat to cold and wet]

____________

 Layering? Can the reader experience the intense cold of that night in the fading light - trees either side of the road, silent? Pine smell, the hot metallic smell of the blood from the deer?

Lots to do.

Michael Clayton Shooting Script

 Billie Mernit may have written a bestselling book on ‘Writing the Romantic Comedy’, but he also has an entertaining, but professional blog covering topical aspects of the Screenwriting Business and Craft.

I found his recent post ‘The Movie on the Page’ on Tony Gilroy and his script for Michael Clayton was particularly insightful.

 http://livingromcom.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/01/the-movie-on-th.html 

“The primary thing in a screenplay is to make the reading experience as identical to seeing the movie as possible…  I want the prose to match the tone of the movie.  I want it to smell as much like the movie as it possibly can.” Tony Gilroy

Cinematic storytelling — the term that’s come to define this particular approach to screenwriting — involves a kind of three-step process (though these steps are often enacted simultaneously):

1)       you conceive your story in filmic terms,

2)       you see the movie in your head, and

3)       you write the story in a language that vividly communicates that movie’s sounds and images.

 ‘Their writers have put the movie in their minds on the screenplay page — so specifically that any director worth his lens-knowledge could tell what the movie was supposed to look, sound and feel like.

This technique is not new to Screenwriters – and it may surprise you to know that it is certainly not a new concept for writers of Fiction novels.

For Billie, these award winning screenplays ALL benefit from the technical skill and craft of the screenwriter to vividly and passionately transfer the images and scenes played out inside their own heads onto paper.

Three dimensional sensory images, sensations, settings must be accurately and faithfully re-created on the page so that the reader can re-experience them.

Otherwise, how can the reader – or in this case, cinematographer, recreate that emotional experience for themselves, and live through the life of that character?

That’s our job.  Want to read the Shooting Script for Michael Clayton – go here.

Well worth it. http://bigscreenlittlescreen.net/2008/01/30/michael-clayton-script/ 

For other Oscar movie scripts, try here; http://bigscreenlittlescreen.net/2008/01/10/get-your-scripts/ 

Miramax:–

No Country for Old Men: script (PDF). Written and directed by Ethan and Joel Coen. Based on the book by Cormac McCarthy. Starring Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, and Tommy Lee Jones.–

 The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: script (PDF). Screenplay by Ronald Harwood. Based on the book by Jean-Dominique Bauby. Directed by Julien Schnabel. Starring Mathieu Amalric.

– The Hoax: script (PDF). Screenplay by William Wheeler. Based on the book by Clifford Irving. Directed by Lasse Hallström. Starring Richard Gere, Alfred Molina, Marcia Gay Harden, Hope Davis, Julie Delpy, and Stanley Tucci.

pic = Warner Bros

The Benefits of Leaving your Precious Manuscript Out of View for a few months.

So here I am. With 130,000 words of the most challenging, riveting, compelling thriller I have ever written.

I have put this particular manuscript to one side for a few months during which I completed, and submitted another book.

It is international, with stunning sensual settings, it is based on a current topical medical issue worldwide, and it frames the emotional impact of this dilemma on some deeply flawed characters thrown out of their ordinary world into a very real underworld, where they are going to have to work hard to get out in one piece.

So. Time to get to work. I pick up the printed pages, recline on my comfy sofa and start reading.

I am now half way through, and one thing is clear.

I am going to have to re-write most of it.

I can already see a number of key factors which leap out of the pages at me;

* there are WAY too many characters with speaking parts. And why have I given some of them names which start with the same initial? And sound phonetically similar?

* I will probably have to cut the first 3 chapters - too much background and technical detail, way too much context and not enough action. There is a lot of scientific material to convey and I am trying to avoid InfoDump. Serious slashing to come.

* the violence and action which creates the Inciting Incident in Chapter One hits two characters who are not introduced prior to the traumatic event, so the reader does not know anything about them. Why should they care that these things are happening to these people? Why should they invest their emotional energy and time in these characters?

* I have a female protagonist who is so flawed I am worried that the reader will not be able to empathise or sympathise with her. 

* The other main character is the macho male professional detective. I have not given the reader anything about his background or personality. Nothing is written from his point of view at the moment and there are no introspective elements I can work.

 And then there is the BIG, BIG problem.

I have NOT made it clear that there is a deep, intense, personal connection between the criminal/the crime committed, and my female heroine/detective.

Her ghost = linked to the motivation for the crime.

By solving this crime my heroine will retrieve what is missing in her life and put the past to rest. And I have not made that obvious from the first page.

Big Mistake. Huge. Without that element, why should the reader invest in this person and what they are going to have to go through to come out the other end some 400 pages later?

Hey hum. On with the Show. Time to get back to the fundamentals.

In December last year, R J Ellory posted on the reality of the Fiction Publishing Business and how much most authors earn from their hard work and emotional investment.

http://rjellory.blogspot.com/2007/12/some-surprising-facts-and-figures.html

It is not for the faint-hearted.

For Romance authors some of this data is already familiar through the online communities and sites such as this:

http://www.brendahiatt.com/id2.html

I have a new character in my thriller - his first name is Erasmus. There is something about that name ….. I love it and all of the connotations that come with it. And to me, it is spot on for a detective.

Sourced Quotes from Erasmus of Rotterdam- When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.

Un-sourced Quotes-

Tony Gilroy is the screenwriter responsible for Michael Clayton and the Bourne Trilogy and clearly a master of the thriller genre.

John Truby * commented in his October newsletter on the story techniques Tony Gilroy used to create the effective and compelling movie experience in Michael Clayton.

One of the most powerful of these is to clearly establish the Personal Need of the Main character, and then connect that need to the crime that character must solve. If you make this a powerful, personal connection, then the audience has the cathartic pleasure of seeing the hero solve his personal problems at the same time as he solves the crime.

You are controlling the emotional experience of the person in the audience watching the movie at the same time as the hero achieves the double goal.

This aspect of the craft hit home to me today in a powerful way as I read ‘The Abduction’ by Mark Gimenez **. The novel opens with one of the main characters, Ben Brice and sets up his personal need and ghost in the two opening chapters.

As the story progresses it is revealed that [and I am trying to avoid spoilers here];

* there is a direct, personal connection between the crime Ben goes out to solve and his own ghost and pain, and the anatagonist is deeply linked to him at 3 or 4 levels - Ben is still causing the villain pain, just as the villain is still causing Ben pain

* the crime is carried out because decisions Ben made as a result of actions in the past by that same criminal - these are complex, and revealed step by step to explain the motivation for the crime and the reaction from the characters

* each of the other main characters in the book, including the victim, is involved because of that connection

* the compulsory one to one scene at the end is between, for the most part, Ben and the criminal face to face

* the crime is solved, the bad guys are defeated, Ben is at peace.

Powerful technique indeed.

 * http://www.truby.com/

** http://www.abductionthebook.com/

Tess Gerritsen was interviewed recently by Sandra Rutton in SpineTingler Magazine http://spinetinglermagazine.blogspot.com/2008/01/interview-tess-gerritsen-switching.html about the very real and personal decisions writers take when framing their story.

For example;

‘Sandra Rutton : Recently, there was an exhaustive discussion about whether or not the mystery genre is stagnate. You stated:“If you write something different, REALLY different, you get punished for it in reader confusion and poor sales.

The vast majority of readers want the same thing, over and over again. If you give them something they’re not expecting, the chances are, only a minority will truly appreciate what you’ve done.
“So your sales suffer. And that begins the downward spiral of your sales, a spiral that could well turn into a death spiral from which your sales may not recover. And then you can’t sell ANY books, and that’s where being truly creative got you.

“Some years ago, I wrote what I think of as my best book, GRAVITY. A thriller without any villains. A thriller set in orbit. It got the best reviews of my life and yet it sold the fewest copies. And it took me years for my career to recover from that disastrous experience.
“Some of us long to write the truly creative, truly off-beat book. But we must do so with the full realization that for the most part, the reading public wants plain old-fashioned vanilla. “How hard do you find it to balance the scales between the idea calling to you, the thing you’d love to try, and the idea you know can sell?

I’d like to believe that my readers are open-minded enough to stay with me, to follow me in a new and different direction, but I know many of them won’t. They certainly didn’t reach for GRAVITY. When a book I love does poorly, I’m most disappointed in my readers.

I think the only way one can survive as both an artist and a working writer is to limit the number of risks you take. You have to give the readers what they crave, the books they’ve come to expect from you. But every so often, just for yourself, write a book you need to write.
Otherwise you’ll get to the end of your career and look back with regret on all the projects you didn’t write, but dearly wanted to.’

For me this interview frames the very real decision making dilemma writers face;

• there are storylines and crime fiction scenarios which the author is passionate about and wants to communicate to the readers
• she has to frame those stories into a format and tell them the best way she can
• she has studied the market and recognised the framework of crime fiction tropes which seem to be common to the bestselling work by popular authors - but they are the style she writes in.
• she want to be a contracted, working, professional author. She also wants to express her personal voice.
• she knows that literary agents and publishers run a business to make money and to do that they need to sell consumers something they need and want/ or will want.

Time to bite the bullet and get down to create a product which can appeal to a wide audience and will make itself irresistable to the market - and STILL retain a unique and special voice.

Better get to work.

The Crime Fiction Dossier has a great post on the topic of Favourite - or Least Favourite PI Novel cliches - go here for the content: http://www.crimefictionblog.com/2008/02/favorite-or-lea.html

For example -

• *The psycho sidekick who does the dirty work so that the hero can keep his hands clean.
• The detective who’s a gourmet cook.
• The detective who drives a flashy car. (Would you really try to tail someone in a Ferrari or Shelby Cobra?)
• The detective as social worker — not only does he solve your case, he heals your soul.
• The detective who’s a gimmick instead of a character: he loves Bugs Bunny, he’s got OCD, he’s a leper, he’s a left-handed transsexual, he thinks he’s from Mars, etc.
• the alcoholic
• the jazz player

And I would add the:

* ex-cop/government agent/ detective looking after some loved one who will no doubt be targetted by the ‘bad guys’ within the first 3 chapter = Inciting Incident.

The Comments here are ace.

pic of Marty Feldman from Corbis

Please allow me to introduce an option for the Cover Page of  my current Medical Thriller. 

The working title is ‘Hologram’ - which I particularly like, since most people who use Prescription Medicines are famliar with the Holographic anti-counterfeit tags used by Pharmaceutical companies for the more expensive items.

The impact of Counterfeit Medicines on the poorest, and most disenfranchised groups of peopl earound the world, forms the basis of the storyline in Hologram. The truly International nature of the Counterfeit Medicine trade is reflected in the range of locations used in the story.

The initial scenes are set in the High Northern Himalyas in Nepal, and these traumatic events draw my main characters from the Pinot Noir vineyards of Oregon state, bustling London streets, and the beaches of Kerala, India to congregate in the slums of Kathmandu.

The huge recent upsurge in Counterfeit Medicine trade outside of developing countries raises some critical questions to Healthcare providers across the west. and over the next few weeks I hope to add more Resource Material on the background and range of this trade in death in the Story Behind the Book section.

Thank you for your patience and interest. I would love to hear any comments or other feedback on the cover style and layout.