Advice From a Literary Agent

by Lois Winston

Whether you're writing mysteries or another genre, your manuscript needs a great story, great characters and great writing. The quality of the writing determines the difference between an acceptance and rejection. As a literary agent and author, I see too many submissions where the writer needs to place her manuscript on a diet.

Before you submit your manuscript, make sure it's not bloated with excess wordage that drags down the pacing and bores the very people you want to impress. Your writing must be crisp as well as succinct to catch an editor's or agent's eyes.

The Bloated Manuscript Diet:

1. Reread your manuscript. Is every scene essential to the plot, or goals, motivations or conflicts of your characters? Does each scene advance the plot or does it tell the reader something she needs to know about the characters? If not, the scene is filler, and you need to get rid of it. Each scene must serve a purpose. No purpose? No scene.

2. Repeat #1 for all dialogue. If the dialogue is nothing but chit chat, ditch it.

3. Do a search of "ly" words. Whenever possible, substitute a more active, descriptive word to replace an existing verb and the adverb that modifies it.

4. Instead of using many verbs to describe a noun, use one all-encompassing adjective or a more descriptive noun.

5. Say it once, then move on. It's not necessary to repeat an idea or image in different words in the next sentence, next paragraph or next page.

6. Identify needless words and eliminate them. Every writer has at least one or two pet words that need to be eliminated.

7. Avoid a laundry list of descriptions by substituting more descriptive nouns and adjectives.

8. Do a search for "was." Whenever it's linked with an "ing" verb, omit the "was" and change the tense of the verb.

9. Choose  more descriptive verbs and omit the additional words that enhance the verb.

10. Omit extraneous tag lines. If it's obvious which character is speaking, omit the tag.

11. Show, don't tell. Whenever possible, you want to "show" your story through dialogue and active narrative, rather than "telling" the story.

12. Let your characters' words convey their emotions, not the tag line. Also, keep to the unobtrusive "said" in tags. You can't grimace, laugh or sigh dialogue. The character can grimace, laugh or sigh before or afterward, but not while speaking.

13. Avoid non-specific things like "it" and "thing."

14. Describe body movements only when they are essential to the scene. Don't break up dialogue every other sentence with having your characters shrug, giggle, smirk, glance, nod or drum their fingers.

15. Don't fill dialogue with interjections. We might have the bad habit of filling our speech with "well" and "like" but having a character constantly adding those words makes for lousy dialogue.

(Excerpted from The Mystery Writers,  now in print, ebook and audiobooks editions, which includes Lois Winston's interview.)

My Mountaintop Paradise Is For Sale

Looking for a quiet summer retreat or full time living with panoramic mountain views? My 58-acre ranch is for sale. The 2,280 sq. ft. house was built in 2009, has four bedrooms and three baths, a family room with fireplace, hardwood floors, porcelain tile back splash in the kitchen, crown molding, stainless steel appliances, family room with wood burning fireplace, oversized three-car garage, new metal roof, a 12' x 20' deck with the awesome view pictured above. The 64' x 40' x 14' shop has a concrete floor and storage area. There are no covenants or homeowners fees and annual property taxes are as low as $1,500. The ranch is located in the Laramie Mountains at 6,700 ft. in Central Wyoming.

There are also two wells on the property, the domestic one over 600 ft. deep, producing more than 15 gal. of water a minute, and good tasting water it is. The other is a solar-generated stock well in the lower pasture. You can contact me here or my realtor, Val Lathrop, at Equity Brokers: val@casperforsale.com. For an array of photos click on the following link: House photos.

Deer grazing in the side yard.

So What Are You Waiting For?

by Robert Liparulo (bestselling author whose books have been adapted to film.)

Write! Nothing takes the place of writing for learning the craft. Not formal education, not seminars or conferences or books about writing Not critique groups or deep conversations with like-minded friends, not studying the markets, not reading. All are valuable, but they're insignificant when compared to experientially learning how to get what's in your head on the page in a way that gets your ideas into another's head. 

Not everything you write will be or should be published but you have to rack up enough words to learn the craft to attract editors and eventually readers. In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell uses the Beatles and Bill Gates to validate "The 10,000-Rule," which says that highly successful people in any field have to put in 10,000 hours practicing their craft before they hit their stride or rise above the competition. The average full-time work year is 2,040 hours, so we're talking about five solid years of writing, and only writing. At 500 words per hour, that's 500,000,000 words committed to paper.

But let's be realistic and admit that telling a story is more than slamming out words. You have to think through a story, maybe outline it; research it, write it, then edit, revise and polish. If we give equal time to planning, researching, writing and editing, 10,000 hours still mean 125,000,000 words on page or screen.

The words can take any form of communication--personal letters, practice stories, blog posts, proposals, articles and short fiction published in magazines. (Sure, you can score some cash during this time; the Beatles were paid to play in Liverpool and Hamburg almost nonstop for three years while they honed their craft.) All of it moves you closer to the brass ring, a publishing contract or bestseller. 

Thing is, it's easy to fool ourselves that a pseudo-writing endeavor like attending a conference and  talking about writing is writing. It's not.

One million, two hundred and fifty thousand words! How far along are you? If you knew, really knew that upon reaching that figure (give or take some) you'd be the best of the best and no editor would dream of rejecting you, wouldn't you choose to write over doing those has-something-to-do-with-writing-but-isn't writing things? 

So what are you waiting for?

(Excerpted from The Mystery Writers, where you can read Robert Liparulo's interview as well as access his writing tips for fledgling writers.)

My Tatoosh Islands Adventure

I was invited to the Tatoosh Islands by my brother Bob, a career coast guardsman, who was in charge of the small island group collectively named for a chief of the Makah Indian nation. The three small islands are the most northwesterly point of the continental U.S. and located in the Straits of Juan de Fuca, half a mile from the coast of Neah Bay, Washington. The lighthouse, Cape Flattery, is located on Tatoosh's main island.

My vacation on Tatoosh was an adventure from the start. My first plane belly-dived onto the runway in Stockton, California, because the landing gear failed to release. A rough landing but, fortunately, no one was hurt. It did, however, result in a six-hour delay before a replacement plane arrived after two in the morning. We landed in Seattle-Tacoma airport at about four and at 6:30 a.m. I learned that I was to fly the remainder of the trip on a three-seater, single engine Cessna--no larger than my car--over the Olympic Mountains to Neah Bay. By the way, it was my first ever trip by plane.

Seated behind the pilot and another passenger, I could see the mountain peaks protruding through the clouds and I’ve never been so frightened in my life because air currents had us falling dangeously close to the peaks. When we reached the tiny airport some miles from Neah Bay, the landing strip looked like a narrow, cracked sidewalk with weeds growing up between the cracks.

My brother wasn’t there to meet me, so I hitched a ride with the other passenger, who was stationed at the coast guard base located on the Makah Indian reservation at Neah Bay. 

We then proceeded to the base where I met my brother and we waited for a small boat to come from the island to pick us up. When we reached the main island of Tatoosh, an inexperienced coastie was operating the crane that lowered the boatswain’s “chair” to the ocean.. The wooden box was about two feet square and connected to a cable. I was lifted from the boat up a sheer rock face that was a hundred feet high. I screamed like a wounded water buffalo. When I reached the top, the box was swung to a wooden platform, landing hard enough to nearly break both my ankles.

Did I mention that the airline lost my luggage? I wore my brother’s coast guard uniforms for a week, and fortunately, one of the coasties had a pair of tennis shoes that fit me. The fog horn woke me repeatedly during the night although the other inhabitants of the island said they were able to sleep through it.

I loved the lighthouse at Cape Flattery, located at the western end of the half mile by quarter mile island. Built in 1857, the island has alternatively been inhabited by Makah Indian fishing parties, the coast guard, weather bureau employees and the navy. The guest book is fascinating to read and I wish I had been able to photograph some of the entries. It tells of 19th century fishermen and explorers who visited the island by climbing the damp rocks to the surface. Some of their companions drowned or were killed from falls in the process.

I nearly lost my own life when I volunteered to mow the jungle-like undergrowth that threatens to take over the island. The tractor slid backward down an embankment and nearly went over the edge onto the rocks a hundred feet below. Once was enough. It still gives me chiils thinking about it.

A bird sanctuary is located adjacent to the main island and I watched a variety of colorful sea birds take off and land, as well as seals and other marine life. Across the Straits of Juan de Fuca is Vancouver Island, Canada, which I could see on a clear day, which is not very often. When I wasn’t watching sea birds and visiting the lighthouse, I enjoyed playing cards and billards with the coasties and watching films in their small basement movie theater.

We were fogged in the morning I was scheduled to leave, so I was able to stay two extra days. The morning I left, a small coast guard cutter arrived with my luggage, and I dressed like a civilian and boarded the cutter for the trip back to the mainland. Five minutes later, a wave swamped the boat and I looked like a drowned rat when I boarded the small plane for the trip back to Seattle. During the subsequent trip home, my plane left without me in Stockton, California, so I waited again for another plane.

I'd been expected to start my first newspaper reporting job several days before I returned home and was nearly fired before I began.The publisher said he'd traveled to northwestern Washington several times and had never heard of the Tatoosh Islands. Thankfully, I was able to whip out an island postcard, which saved my job. I also wrote a feature story about my trip for the newspaper.

The island is no longer inhabited and no coast guardsmen or weather station employees remain.Tatoosh has become one of the most intensively studied field sites for marine life in the world. Studies have discovered how various species are linked to one another through a network of interactions, and how environmental changes resulting in the extinction of certain species, have affected the marine life food chain.

Anyone who now wants to visit the Tatoosh islands must ask permission from the Makah Indian Reservation officials at Neah Bay on Washington’s beautiful Olympia Penninsula.

My Visit with Sue Grafton

Sue Grafton published ‘A’ is for Alibi in 1982, following 15 years in Hollywood as a television script writer. The Louisville, Kentucky, native was publicizing her 22^nd novel in the series, ‘V’ is for Vengeance, when I interviewed her. She's been published in 28 countries in 26 languages, her books selling in the millions. She's featured in my recently released book, The Mystery Writers, from Medallion Books in print, Kindle and Nook.

Sue, does ’V’ is for Vengeance differ significantly from your previous novels?

It does, indeed, differ from the other novels in the series. In writing these books over a span of some twenty-eight years, I’ve kept detailed charts, which denote the gender of every killer I write about, the gender of the victim, the motive for the crime, and the nature of the climax. I also keep a set of log lines for each novel, describing the set-up for each book.

In ‘A’ . . . Kinsey’s hired to prove the innocence of a woman just out of prison after serving seven years for the murder of her husband.

In ‘B’ . . . Kinsey’s hired to find a woman whose signature is required on a minor document.

In ‘C’ . . . Kinsey’s hired by a kid to find out who’s been trying to murder him.

And so on. This way, I can be certain I’m not inadvertently repeating myself. In ‘V,’ Kinsey witnesses a shoplifting incident and alerts a sales clerk who notifies store security. The shoplifter is arrested and two days after her fiancé  makes bail, she dies from a leap off a 400 foot high bridge. While it appears to be a suicide, the woman’s fiancé is convinced she was murdered and hires Kinsey to look into her death. Kinsey’s investigation uncovers an organized retail theft ring with which the shoplifter has been working. There are two other subplots woven into the overall storyline and all connect at the end.

How do you and Kinsey Millhone differ and which characteristics do you share?

As for Kinsey, I think of her as my alter-ego . . . the person I might have been had I not married young and had children. We’re like one soul in two bodies and she got the good one. The ’68 VW she drove (until ‘G’ is For Gumshoe) was a car I owned some years ago. In ‘H’ is for Homicide, she acquires the 1974 VW that was sitting out behind my house until I donated it to a local charity that raffled it off. That car was pale blue with only one minor ding in the left rear fender

I own both handguns she talks about and in fact, I learned to shoot so that I would know what it felt like. I also own the all-purpose back dress she wears. Like Kinsey, I’ve been married and divorced twice, though I’m now married to husband number three and intend to remain so for life. I’m much more domestic than she is and I cuss just as much, if not more.

What’s going to happen to Kinsey when you‘ve finished ‘Z’ is for Zero?

It’s going to take me another eight to ten years to complete the series at the pace I’ve settled on so I have close to a decade to decide what I’ll do after ‘Z’ is for Zero. I may well continue to chronicle her adventures, but I’ll do so as stand-alone novels. No more linking titles!

What’s your work schedule like?

I usually arrive at my desk at 9:00 am, check e-mails and Facebook, and then log into the current working journal for the novel I’m in the process of writing. I use these journals to talk to myself about the story, the characters, the pacing, problems I foresee, and any scene that worries me. Any research I do is recorded in the journal as well. I break briefly for lunch and then return to my desk and work until mid-afternoon when I stop and do a walk of three to five miles. My guess is that on a good day, I work productively for two hours. The rest is writer’s block and Free Cell. I’ve been known to work by page count and on that theory, I consider two pages a day a good run. In fact, I consider page count a better way to operate. It’s way too easy to claim you’ve worked for six hours when in reality you’ve talked on the phone, cleaned your desk drawers, and dawdled the time away.

What do you want your readers to experience from your novels?

I’d like for my readers to experience an entire range of emotions, from laughter to fear, to suspense to anxiety to tears depending on where they are in any given book. I want them to feel connected to Kinsey Millhone, to see the world as she sees it, and to come away from a story understanding how it’s affected her. These are the same emotions I look for in any book I read. I want to be touched and moved and I want to come away from a writer’s work feeling renewed and refreshed.

Thank you, Sue.

You can read the entire interview in The Mystery Writers along with 59 other bestselling, award-winning and journeymen writers. The advice they offer is invaluable for any genre.  And you can communicate with Sue Grafton on Facebook.

Combining Mysteries with the Western Genre

by (sisters) Vickie Britton and Loretta Jackson

We are asked many times why we choose to write in two different genres, westerns and mysteries. This is the result of a long process, one that evolved over time.

We launched our co-authoring career with a mystery novel.  Later we decided to try our hand at writing a western, but we couldn’t quite leave the element of mystery behind.  We became interested in gambling in the Old West, and that led to our three-book series: The Luck of the Draw.  In this series Sheriff Jeff McQuede is a side character interwoven into the stories.  He is suspicious of our hero, Drew Woodson, but has a sense of frontier justice and helps him solve crimes.  He is not above breaking the rules when he feels it’s justified.

Our Latest Western with a Touch of Mystery

The early day sheriff, Jeff McQuede, inspired the westerns that followed.  Our new western, Rails and Aces, although not part of the gambling series, carries on the western gambling theme, as does our single title, Death Comes in Pairs.  In Rails and Aces lawman Sheriff Deakin might be involved in the local train robbery ring.  Our hero, Jace Keeler, a free and easy gambler, falls in love with Deliah Cade, a mysterious woman he meets on a train slated to be robbed.  He discovers Deliah is the “intended” of the much-feared outlaw, Jonas Grisby.  Jace must face his wrath as well as a gang of outlaws who suspect him of taking the missing money from the recent train robbery.

How modern-day Sheriff Jeff McQuede came about

The contemporary Sheriff McQuede began as a character in a short story—the first one in our anthology, A Deal on a Handshake.  A trip to the annual Mountain Man Rendezvous in Riverton, Wyoming, inspired us to use the rendezvous as a background for our story.  Its history is intriguing.  In 1838 and following years, rough and tumble traders gathered in Riverton to barter, to swap stories, and have a good time.  We found the modern day rendezvous a great place to contrast the concept of Old West values with new ones.  The story called for a contemporary sheriff, and because we liked the standards Jeff McQuede represents, he became the hero in several more short stories and of the novel, Murder in Black and White.  Since we wanted to write another novel about Wyoming and further develop our lead character, we created the High Country Mystery series.

         

Our inspiration for these novels came mainly from living in Wyoming and South Dakota—Vickie, in Laramie, Loretta, on the Pine Ridge Reservation.  This gave us a deep interest in both the contemporary and historic accounts of the West.  We wander from museum to museum, research in libraries, and, most of all, talk to the local people.  For example our Jeff McQuede short story. “Never Trust a Coward,” was written after we heard how after committing a robbery two criminals had actually checked into a modern Wyoming motel as Frank and Jesse James.  Needless to say, they were quickly found and apprehended.  Many of the stories in our anthology, A Deal on a Handshake, concern the difference between justice in the Old West and justice today.

These stories are set in the fictional, rugged Black Mountains, near an Arapaho Reservation and a coal mine.  While writing Murder in Black and White and the short stories, the fictional towns of Durmont and Black Mountain Pass, Wyoming, began to take form, as real to us as any actual place.  The characters also became real to us—Jeff McQuede's girlfriend, Loris Conner, curator of the local museum, his close friends, Professor Barry Dawson, and Nate Narcu, who runs Nate's Trading post, as well as the two rascals the sheriff is never quite able to convict, Ruger Larsh and Sammy Ratone. 

In our High Country Mystery Series, contemporary sheriff, Jeff McQuede, is fascinated by his early-day relative, a local legend whose picture and history are displayed in the local museum.  He tries to live up to his namesake’s common-sense code.  When faced with a problem, he remembers a quote of the old sheriff, “When you think you have the answer, it’s time to go back and take another look.” 

McQuede finds that the code of the Old West still exists in the minds of many people, some who aren’t above a shootout and still believe in vigilante justice.  But unlike his namesake, he is sometimes conflicted about what he wants and how to achieve his goals as the sheriff of Coal County.  He wants to be a good, fair sheriff and stay within the boundaries of the law, no matter how tempted he is to cross them as his namesake had no qualms in doing.

Our Fourth Jeff McQuede Novel: The Executioner’s Hood

Our latest book in the Jeff McQuede series, The Executioner’s Hood, is a blend of both worlds as McQuede embarks upon a case where a highly respected judge, Phil Grayson, is found murdered—an ominous hood placed over his head.   Among the judge’s many enemies, one in particular, Darin Keefe, had been given a harsh sentence and has just been released from prison.  Was the killer seeking revenge, or was the judge murdered by a robber wanting some item from his macabre collection of Old West law items, among them a priceless death mask and valuable guns from famous outlaws?  Or is his murder a conspiracy to cover up a crime committed by Durmont’s city commissioners fifteen years ago which surfaces now in the form of modern-day vigilantes?

Because both of us love the rugged West and the characters who inhabit it, we will continue working on the High Country Mystery series.  
time we are beginning a fifth novel. 

John Mantley Part III

"Gunsmoke" producer John Mantley said of  the show's star, "I can tell you it was great fun to work with James Arness and the entire cast. They were a sheer delight and some of the best professions I've ever had the pleasure to work with. I wrote "Gunsmoke" scripts but I was far too busy producing the show to write many of them. And to be honest, I have never really liked to write. 

"Most of what I have today was earned with words, but I never actually enjoyed the process of writing. I've found it the hardest work I've ever done."

Mantley received five consecutive Western Heritage awards,  and shared honors with Calvin Clements and Earl Wallace for the 1978 Spur Award for "How the West was Won." He was also a recipient of the William F. Cody Award. 

He felt that the  networks should stay out of the creative process. During the golden age of television, "the only people who looked at your rough cuts or your manuscripts were advertising agencies to protect their clients. They came to rough cut screening to make sure you didn't ford a river if you were sponsored by Chevrolet--as in "Bonanza." As a result of that, in their 13-year history, characters in "Bonanza" never forded a river, they crossed it. On the other hand, we at "Gunsmoke" forded a lot of rivers, but I was fond of saying that 'we never chevroleted one.'"

Mantley operated his own production company for a number of years and was loaned out to produce "Wild, Wild West," "Dirty Sally" and "How the West Was Won," among others. 

Heavily involved in show business politics, he served on the board of directors of the Producer's Guild, and hosted the earliest meetings of the caucus of the Producers,Writers and Directors in his own backyard. He also co-chaired the organization in his later years, which was comprised of some 175 members "who between them are responsible for the majority of all prime-time television entertainment."

Mantley advised fledgling script writers to "Write, write, write. The more you write, the more you learn. " But that doesn't offer much encouragement in the declining freelance market. "Yes, you do have to be thick-skinned to survive as a script writer, because having your work rewritten by producers is bad enough, but you also have to expect to have it rejected for the most inane reasons."

Having apprenticed in two of the most highly skilled but lowest paying jobs as actor and  writer, Mantley said, "I did all kinds of things to support my acting career--liquor store clerk, dishwater, parking attendant, bus boy--and as far as acting is concerned, I really never had much problem. But after I sold those two novels, I sort of wrote steadily until I got to producing and then I was able to get away from writing, which was a consummation devotedly to be wished."

Mantley was back in Dodge City as executive producer of "Gunsmoke" during the fall of 1987. Filmed in Calgary, Canada, the two-hour CBS television movie, featured an aging Marshall Matt Dillon back in the saddle again.

(This interview was excerpted from my book, Maverick Writers.)