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.

For a fiction writer who has just been through a virtual book tour, making an assessment  could very well mean grading the graders.
 
For openers, no matter how carefully you provide a summary of what your novel is all about, you’re subject to a number of filtering systems that seem to fall into three categories.
 
In my own case and for some unknown reason, the initial responses came from those who like to make cursory, snap judgments. For example: “I don’t really go for handyman types who have no business solving crimes. But I really go for vampire stories like the one I posted last week which was really hot and sexy.”  Needless to say, all you can do is hope remarks like these won’t find their way onto Amazon and Goodreads.
 
Next, there are reviewers who get so involved they tend to want to alter the narrative: “I really loved Jed. He reminded me of some guys I knew. But I didn’t like those state policemen who were so mean to him.” In other words, without realizing it, this woman  wanted to change what was driving Jed out of his comfort zone. On one hand, it’s always good to know you’ve created a central character readers can relate to. On the other hand, if you’re governed by how readers might personally react to the given circumstances, your tale will never be truthfully self-generating.     
 
At best are the hosts who can pull back and function as bone fide reviewers, offering meaningful comments for potential readers and a critique a writer can at least ponder over: “I think a good story brings you in, doesn’t let you go, and when it’s over you think about it for days if not more. The author of Murder Run has a way of plying you with bouts of suspicion and conspiracy that keep you coming back until the very end.”
 
Even if these latter two lines were part of a mixed review or even a negative one, they stem from a source that is actually applying standards. Giving you something to consider re: your craft at this point in your creative journey.     
 
To be fair to the tour runner, there’s a takeaway from the entire gamut. You can begin to zero in on your special readership. You can think about the correlation between what you tried to do and how it seems to be coming across. On balance, if nothing else, it’s what happens when you take a chance and throw yourself out there.
 
 
 
 

When you write crime fiction stand-alones, and your publisher is never quite sure how to categorize your work, and a mystery writer acquaintance suggests you might want to opt for “hanging with the literary crowd,” perhaps it’s time to delve a little further. Perhaps, there’s something to gain by tapping into websites run by hosts who, supposedly, would like nothing better than to review new works.  
 
But no matter what the motive, going this route amounts to a search for some correlation between what you set out to do and how it’s generally perceived.  
 
And so, as this foray plays itself out, maybe we can take stock of a virtual tour while the experience is still fresh in my mind.
 
At the outset, there seems to be a big difference in the quality of the sites, the graphic designs and the sense of creative flair. Which also seems to telegraph the quality of the reviews. For the sake of argument, let’s call the less ambitious blog hosts the “hey-it’s-just-me” critics. On this level you’re apt to receive comments like “It was okay but I don’t go for drifter types,” “I couldn’t really get into it but this next one that came along, this vampire romance was really hot and sexy.” And so on.  
 
Needless to say, this kind of feedback isn’t much help. These sites may simply serve as an exchange for easily-sloughed-off new releases.   
 
Interspersed between the just-me reviews are those that provide a little more to go on. Such as, “I really loved Jed. He was quirky and quiet and like some guys I’ve met. And I didn’t appreciate at all how mean the cops were to him.” Here, at least, we have one element to hang the relative success of the tale on—empathy. And though it was extremely short, here’s another: “This is a complex puzzle but Jed is the good guy and I cheered him on.” And here’s a third. “All told, I really liked the interplay between the characters.”
 
Sometimes it gets even better. Now and then, a review like this is apt to turn up: “It starts out at a steady pace and quickly takes us down a rabbit hole of twists and turns. The characters are so real, so human, you might forget they’re fictional.” It’s not so much that the feedback is so positive. It’s the fact that you’re offered some inkling of rhythm, dynamics, surprise, and believability. In coming across a more savvy reviewer, you might even discover elements you didn’t realize were there. Or, as a learning experience, aspects of storytelling where you inadvertently felt short.
 
Granted, your niche may still elude you, along with your place among the literary crowd (whatever that means). However, after you sort through it all, you might just have a better idea of the general impression you’ve made.  
 
        
 

  As a custom of mutual support, and though we write in different styles, a pair of mystery writers and I exchange published copies of our latest work. I write stand-alones and they write cozies with continuing characters. They know what to expect from their focus groups; I’m never sure and, for whatever reason, throw caution to the wind. All three of us like to have some thoughtful feedback right before the onslaught of reviews. On this go-round however, my two colleagues found they were pressed for time.

  Since we try our best to create plausible characters within the given circumstances, taking a chance on a friendly contact on Facebook who belonged to the same online group seemed like an option. The problem was I had no idea format-driven cozies existed. As a result, there was no way she and I could relate to each others work. There isn’t much you can do when you run into conflicting filtering systems.

  For example, I discovered she likes to label characters, especially in musical terms. Her heroine would refer to a couple as “She was the bow to his violin.” As a result, she  couldn’t understand why, when encountering Sal, my mercurial, unhinged Capo, others didn’t categorize him as demented.  In my experience, in and around the Big Apple, with its constant pulse, hidden games, and the world’s greatest range of unhinged characters (especially those literally under the gun) there’s no time to label anyone, let alone pin them down. You have to keep on your toes and try to keep up. Which was one of the great joys in writing this tale. With each pressure and response, from a range of disparate characters including a Connecticut handyman and fish out of water, the story kept reverberating and appeared to be self-generating.  

But back to the formatted cozy. At the outset, our heroine and teller of the tale relates how, while swimming, she discovered her beloved Gram’s decaying corpse at the bottom of the lake. Instead of becoming traumatized in dire need of sedation, consultation and rest, she’s merely disturbed. It’s as if she’s looked over at the descriptive heading, knows each chapter will be exactly four-and-a-half pages and has to get on with it. In turn, presumably, the reader too is expected to glance at each heading—“dreamy . . . pastoral . . .  strident and up tempo”—and go along. Instead of getting involved or laboring over the realities, you follow the flitting pattern of key and signature changes. I kept wondering what would happen if the narrator was cut free and left on her own, but that simply wasn't how you played the game.  

I soon learned it all comes down to this. At first glance we seem to be operating under the same umbrella and belong to the same tribe. But if you listen closely, you’re apt to realize we all don’t speak the same language.