This handbook promises a set of “innovative tools for perfecting fiction, captivating readers, and achieving success.”  What it actually offers are 250 pages of checklists based on the premise that you have to perfect and master seven skills, including concept, character, structure, scene work, dialogue, tone and theme, before setting out to conquer this special world. Which is like saying t before embarking on some beckoning Appalachian Trail, you first have to earn a certain number of scouting merit badges.
In rebuttal, the first thing that comes to mind is Anne Lamott’s iconic book Bird by Bird. At the outset, she argues that “perfectionism kills creativity.” She urges all aspiring writers of fiction to follow their heart, intrepidly out on their journey, keep forging ahead and write a lousy first draft with no thought given to the final result. By the same token, F. Scott Fitzgerald famously advised a young aspirant that it takes “the soul of a peasant” to plow ahead no matter what conditions you encounter. Before embarking, you could of course ask yourself if the trip was potentially going to be worth the candle—why here, why now and so what? All and all, however, it’s hard to imagine any creative person wanting to perfect some checklist of skills beforehand, sustained by a vague promise of success (whatever that means) plus an even more vague guaranty that this effort in the long run will “captivate readers.”
Instead, you might be far better off to take into account what inspired and sustained the making of one of your favorite books. Take Harper Lee’s beloved To Kill a Mockingbird. The setting (which isn’t even on Matt Bird’s checklist), namely that of Depression era 1930’s in Lee’s tiny home town Alabama, encompassing all that conjured up—bouts of racism, making due as a child with  games like rolling around in a worn automobile tire, spending hours at the courthouse watching her lawyer father plying his trade, etc—continued to haunt her. And even so, the initial results of her “lousy first draft” was a series of vignettes. Still and all, underneath it all was the rich drive, authenticity and compelling memories which prompted an editor to guide her over the course of a year in New York to turn these vignettes and unique voice into a memorable narrative.
Needless to say, the examples of beginning with an enduring quest are too numerous to recount. As for Matt Bird’s itemized format, it couldn’t hurt to skim through the pages, note which ones may apply during moments when the story fails to come alive, try them out and see whether or not it makes a marked difference. Then again, you might be far better off taking a page from Harper Lee, and seeking out insightful editorial advice.          

Though it’s never been spelled out, my editor at the publishing house and I have a tacit understanding that there’s something filmic at play in good crime fiction. Along with the basic factors, it’s as if there’s also an imaginary cameraman at work looking for something provocative to shoot--zooming in, tracking, taking in the entire scene with a wide angle lens, etc.
In fact, often when I pull back as a narrator, I’m prompted to bring this moment to life instead and pick up on the action.  
For example, in the latest draft of a work in progress, there was a point where I summed up a long-lost cousin’s predicament by simply stating that Miranda (the unwitting sleuth) underscored the situation one last time and moved on.   
The editor felt I should let the moment play out which led to this revision:      
“Look,” Miranda finally said, “I hate to break it to you, kiddo, but the facts are the facts. Cindy at the motel swore it was a guy on a motorcycle who snuck into your room at the crack of dawn. Then tossed your cat into an airport rental where he crawled up by the rear window as the car took off. The upshot is, right-wing pundit Russ Mathews damn well was the driver. He’d obviously flown all the way down from New York to keep you under wraps one way or another.”
As Skip sat there in the passenger seat in stunned silence, she couldn’t help but notice a white compact pulling in a few rows back of the entrance to the ER. It could very well have been that selfsame Toyota Corolla airport rental.
In terms of these frequent prods, the only cinematic justification my editor ever gave was an occasional “given your background” (theater and film), “your genre” and/or “your style” (highly visual and self-generating).
All told, what’s gratifying about this approach is the feedback I’ve generally received from readers. Take a response from Moon Games, my latest foray into the cozy genre. A lady mystery buff from the heartland was taken by “so much going on.” She felt she had to keep alert, like a moviegoer who didn’t want to slip out to the concession stand and miss something. Upon reaching the twisty climax, she declared she was happy she stuck with all the scenes.
Like everything else, seeing the unfolding tale from a movie perspective is no guarantee of success.  However, employing it as part of your writing arsenal surely helps  to keep the reader engrossed. 

Imaginative Dragonfly Reads   April 2019
I love a good mystery and any time I can get my hands on a very good one I get excited. Moon Games was no different. From the characters to the heart of the story, Frome has done a wonderful job creating such a beautiful mysterious piece of literature.
I was confused some, but I could tell it wasn't myself alone. The characters confusion jumped out and grabbed me. A wonderful read filled with such gripping description.
​
Excerpt from Moon Games
The wind picked up yet again, joined by spatters of cold rain and the rustle of leaves from the encircling shrub. 
All at once, the lantern flicked off, a scream cut through the wind and spatters. The cries became muffled, replaced by the grunts of a hulking figure clambering up the knoll, coming directly toward him with something writhing and flailing over its back.
For one interminable moment, he caught sight of her eyes, frozen, terrified, beseeching him.
Reflexively, despite every decent intention deep in his bones, Harry dropped the Maglite, turned and ran down the slope, tripping and stumbling, falling to his knees, righting himself, smacking into a brush that scraped his cheek. Rushing headlong now, smacking into more brush and banging his elbow, he kept it up, twisted his ankle but hobbled forward fast as he could until he reached his station wagon. Squirming behind the wheel, he fumbled for his keys, dropped them on the mat, groped around, snatched them up, grinded the ignition, set both front and back wipers going and shot forward hitting the trunk of a tree. He backed up into the hedgerow, turned sharply, not daring to flip on the headlights, scraped another tree and slid onto the narrow lane.
He switched on the low beams so he could see where he was going in the drizzle and fog and began making his way down. Dull headlight beams flashed behind his rear window and faded.
With his mind racing and the wipers thwacking away as the rain lashed across the windshield, he careened down the zig-zagging lane and thought of the car that was wedged under the branches parked on a downward angle and the hulking figure carrying his prey over his shoulder shambling toward it. And her eyes, those beseeching eyes.  

As a college teacher specializing in novel writing, Dufresne has filled this book with exercises and passages relating his own personal experiences.  He does so as if making the process akin to delving into lessons learned, unfinished business and material at hand or just out of reach. As if reassuring any and all aspiring writers that it’s just a matter of tapping one’s own life while mining for material and then keeping at it and polishing the results.
In effect, Dufresne is just a guy and look what he went through to get to this point. You’ve probably had similar doubts, relationships and/or struggles. If not, turn to one of the exercises like coopting family stories or go back and recall your first love, etc.
However, it’s a sure bet that none of this is going to sustain you and give you that abiding soul of a peasant Fitzgerald spoke of. None of this will carry you through the seasons until the seeding, tilling and plowing in all kinds of weather comes to something you can truly harvest. Moreover, examine one of Dufresne’s novels and it becomes obvious that his personalized dilemmas may or  may not be generally  relatable, let alone his idiosyncratic and somewhat meandering style.
Even in terms of his reliance on memory, pick up a copy of Pat Conroy’s notable Prince of Tides and it’s highly doubtful that anyone else could have employed that flowery style while, at the same time, intensifying personal recollections with imaginary, horrific, southern- gothic traumas—events that psychologically needed to come to light in order for his tidewater protagonist to go on.  
On the positive side however, if you’re more or less just starting out and able to skim through these chapters, you can pick up little gems like “even after you’ve written a second or third draft, you may just be beginning. You’ve still got endless problems to deal with like inconsistent characters and a sputtering through-line for a plot that has to be dealt with.”  
In other words, if you’re sufficiently haunted to begin with and have to work through this dynamic come what may, you might be able to pick up pointers here and there to see you through.  

Though it’s never been spelled out, my editor at the publishing house and I have a tacit understanding that there’s something filmic at play in good crime fiction. Along with the basic factors, it’s as if there’s also an imaginary cameraman at work looking for something provocative to shoot--zooming in, tracking, taking in the entire scene with a wide angle lens, etc.

In fact, often when I pull back as a narrator, I’m prompted to bring this moment to life instead and pick up on the action.  

For example, in the latest draft of a work in progress, there was a point where I summed up a long-lost cousin’s predicament by simply stating that Miranda (the unwitting sleuth) underscored the situation one last time and moved on.
  
The editor felt I should let the moment play out which led to this revision:
     
“Look,” Miranda finally said, “I hate to break it to you, kiddo, but the facts are the facts. Cindy at the motel swore it was a guy on a motorcycle who snuck into your room at the crack of dawn. Then tossed your cat into an airport rental where he crawled up by the rear window as the car took off. The upshot is, right-wing pundit Russ Mathews damn well was the driver. He’d obviously flown all the way down from New York to keep you under wraps one way or another.”
As Skip sat there in the passenger seat in stunned silence, she couldn’t help but notice a white compact pulling in a few rows back of the entrance to the ER. It could very well have been that selfsame Toyota Corolla airport rental.

In terms of these frequent prods, the only cinematic justification my editor ever gave was an occasional “given your background” (theater and film), “your genre” and/or “your style” (highly visual and self-generating).

All told, what’s gratifying about this approach is the feedback I’ve generally received from readers. Take a response from Moon Games, my latest foray into the cozy genre. A lady mystery buff from the heartland was taken by “so much going on.” She felt she had to keep alert, like a moviegoer who didn’t want to slip out to the concession stand and miss something. Upon reaching the twisty climax, she declared she was happy she stuck with all the scenes.

Like everything else, seeing the unfolding tale from a movie perspective is no guarantee of success.  However, employing it as part of your writing arsenal surely helps  to keep the reader engrossed.
 

​Part memoir, part reflection on the writing life--all from King’s personal experience and point of view. In short, this book will not provide an aspiring novelist with a how-to manual in terms of structure, plotting, dialogue or anything else in the way of producing a marketable work. But it does reveal the writing life, the ups and downs, and what one established creator of best-sellers  goes through.  
Put another way, it serves to double-back on any fiction writer’s chosen venture.
For instance, while writing a tale about a troubled teenager named Carrie, he found that her plight didn’t move him emotionally. His lead character just seemed to be a ready-made victim. He also didn’t feel at home with her surroundings and an all-girl supporting cast.  For King, writing is always best when it’s intimate, when he’s truly personally involved.
On the other hand, he began to realize that his first impression may have been as erroneous as the reader’s.  And stopping because the work doesn’t seem to be going well, because the going is hard, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on even if you don’t feel like it. And sometimes you’re actually doing good work even though, at the moment, the project seems hopeless
In a later passage, while working on yet another fright tale called The Shining, he finally realized on a much deeper level his stories were actually a scream for help, a way to confront his demons as an alcoholic from perhaps a safer remove while embarked on a dangerous game all the same.  
If nothing else, as a byproduct, King’s book serves to prod the reader into considering why one writes fiction, is drawn to certain dramatic circumstances, and has to go on no matter what.   

Needless to say, there are notable creative writers who don’t employ tried-and-true formulas or aren’t even aware of any recipes at all. Something begins percolating seemingly out of the blue, or at least emanating from their subconscious, telling them something is up and needs to be explored.

The following are three examples taken from writers I’ve talked with. I’ve left out their names and titles of the finished works to bypass any comparisons or degrees of success in terms of the final product or anything aside from those elusive beginning, promising moments.

There’s a spunky lady who also doubles as a kind of gatekeeper or acquisitions editor who relies on a visual springboard. For example, one day she had this image of a cowboy, plopped down on an open vintage convertible with running boards, stripped of its tires, propped up on cement blocks with the Texas hill country in the background. The cowboy’s hat shielded him from the sun but he appeared to be gazing directly at someone or something that had caught his fancy. Then and there our spunky writer began to wonder who he was, what he was up to and, in short, what in the world was going on.

It wasn’t the opening gambit, our writer had no idea of a story structure. She just knew there was irrepressible energy brewing that had to be worked out.

A New Yorker and a seasoned writer who had moved to the Litchfield Hills of Connecticut often keyed on relationships, especially those that had gone wrong. In those terms, he always writes to discover things that, all the while, he didn’t know that he knew. In one personal instance, after all these years he had never gotten over the fact that his father had continually disparaged his foray into singing and show business instead of pursuing something more manly like sports or gone into business. And so, at a certain point, this seasoned writer felt compelled to go back in time and create a scene under some circumstance or other whereby a son finally has it out with his disparaging father. Again, no thought was given to how to arrive at this climactic scene, only that it was high time to creatively work through this conundrum.  

Lastly, a highly sensitive lady scribe often had troubling moments when she was aware that in someone’s life this was patently not going to be just another day. That all the plans and dreams and life formulas hadn’t at all panned out for, say, a single or divorced or sickly woman approaching middle age who might not be able to go on. Perhaps she was still living with her mother. Perhaps she might not be able to get through the night. What in the world will happen to her?
​
In short, the catalyst could be anything that taps into each writer’s unique sensibility and lingers until she or he simply can’t slough it off and has to go to work, regardless of whether or not there may be an market for the finished product.   

From what I’ve discovered, once a publisher of cozies thinks your manuscript has potential, you’ve passed the first hurdle. You’re then assigned a development editor to make sure the storyline is both fresh and marketable.  

Fresh meaning not at all the same old, same old, like a Miss Marple, with its sedentary armchair detective, homey setting, and unpleasant victims, thus leaving the reader free to focus on the puzzle. At the outset, the sleuth should be engaging, the setting and circumstances intriguing, the victim somehow worthy of the quest, etc. But that’s just for starters.  

For example, take my transatlantic tale centering on two sister villages located on both sides of “the pond”. If I had looked at bestselling author Louise Penny’s Still Life more closely, I wouldn’t have been left to underscore the overview. Penny’s story starts off with the demise of Miss Jane Neal, a seventy-six-year-old spinster, walking in the woods by the remote village of Three Pines on the Quebec border. The narrative immediately pulls back as we get to know Miss Jane’s special world, meet her neighbors and become acquainted with her relationships. Moreover, a flashback takes us to a confrontation over her “Still Life” painting. 

In other words, as my assigned Australian editor insisted, you can’t just get on with it. The circumstances surrounding my rambling tour guide’s venture had to be fully established. The demise of Emily’s beloved mentor and father figure was fine as a catalyst, but what’s the underpinning? Where are we? What is Emily’s Connecticut village like during the leaf-peeper season? What led to her mentor’s dreadful fall? How does she feel about the three siblings she’s slated to guide across the pond now that her life has been turned topsy-turvy? 

Next, segue to the second pass or what my editor calls “the nitty gritty.” Anything and everything that might give the reader pause has to  be dealt with. Why is Emily meeting Harriet (a person of interest and Emil’s chief client) in Bath of all places? How did Harriet’s testy note wind up in the rose garden in Penmead? What is Emily’s prior experience venturing into the foggy, mist-sodden moors? And on and on it goes through the whole narrative.  

As I put aside my hard won sense of drive and pace, there’s no telling what I’ll be up against next. For a writer of crime fiction, the cozy is apt to seem like a foreign country. They do things differently there.
 

When you keep receiving the same guidelines, you can’t help considering it to be received wisdom. Especially when you’ve submitted two mysteries with female protagonists and your respondents are all women. Take these examples from a female publisher, acquisitions editor, an agent, and a president of the Southeast chapter of Mystery Writers of America: “Remember, there must be constant proliferating tension . . . an impossible quest . . . a compelling hook in the first three pages . . . a worthy opponent as the stakes continue to escalate . . .”
   
As it happens, while I wait for the upshot, I’ve been reading Facebook and “Mystery We Write” pal Pat Gligor’s Mixed Messages. And I’m beginning to appreciate a less driven approach.

If memory serves, here is the progression of, approximately, the first quarter of the story.  In the background, every now and then, there are radio bulletins intimating that somewhere not far from a neighborhood in Cincinnati, a serial killer is targeting women. In the foreground, a sensitive housewife is concerned about her marriage and the little trials and tribulations of her two young children. Her husband has become ill-tempered, taken to drink, and flies off the handle when the subject of finances and/or their little boy’s possible ADD is brought up. In turn, the wife wishes she had someone to confide in and is considering taking a part time secretarial job at the church to help make ends meet. Chapters are devoted to the husband’s woes and longings, and the wife’s former confidant-- a retired police officer who mulls over his own drinking problem, a stint as a prisoner of war, other past and present circumstances, and catches the latest bulletin about the Westwood Strangler. There are also chapters devoted to other people who touch on the housewife’s life, and a later scene from her priest’s point of view as he lectures her about the sanctity of marriage, followed by his own reminiscing over an early altercation with a high school girl, a retreat to seminary which, in effect, leaves his shy sister susceptible to the wrong crowd and death at the hands of a drunk driver by the name of Malone.  

In short, as a setup, a sense of unease permeates, along with an alcoholic thread, a kind wife who wishes to make things whole again, touchy encounters within the wife’s immediate circle, and intimations of something dicey out on the periphery.

At the same time, I recall a conversation I had with Laura Lippman about one of her noted crime novels. This particular tale focused on the effect of a father’s desertion on the lives of family members and was sprinkled with a cold case and a little detection. This progression, she told me, was what she was interested in and not the same old, same old crime format.

And so, aside from the fact that some crime writers have a more feminine perspective, perhaps these lady publishing pros I’ve been dealing with are telling me something rather simple. Perhaps they’re saying if you’re going to use the standard hero or heroine’s impossible journey, make sure it’s fresh and compelling.   

It goes without saying that agents and publishers continue to advise fiction writers to make certain their final draft is ready before making a submission.  
 
What this means, of course, is hard to say. Relying on the pointers listed in any of the sure-fire guides to perfecting your story is no guarantee of readiness. In fact, there’s even a “counter intuitive” book out that numbers among the secrets of success “a conflict that’s compelling and ironic before and after the surprise”--whatever in the world that means.
 
In an attempt to get a better handle on the market, I attended a major writers conference in Portland, Oregon and a smaller one in Orlando sponsored by the Mystery Writers of America. In Portland, an “expert in story engineering” offered a series of workshops claiming that attendees had no chance to submit a professional draft unless they followed his formula starting with a gripping opening that inevitably plays itself out. In Orlando, I asked noted crime novelist Laura Lippman why her tale started out with an embezzling father and his mistress on the lam and then shifted to the effect on the lives of the man’s family. She told me that’s what she was interested in: relationships and the aftermath, not the same-old story engineering.  
 
Perhaps that’s the key. What your story is really about and where it might fall short.  
 
Recently, after two “it’s not ready yet” responses, I decided that, before sending it out again, I needed a seasoned reader/writer who could experience my narrative for the first time and earmark those moments when she stopped reading because something didn’t quite jell. When, because at this stage in the process I’m much too close to it, it might have the same now-hold-on-a-minute effect on an agent or acquisitions editor.  
 
As a result, I found a seasoned colleague who offered to do a diagnostic reading for a small fee. After dealing with the underlying shortcomings she noted, I now truly have a final draft. The outcome, of course, is still out of my hands.