I haven’t read all the Jack Reacher books, but Lee Child says several interesting things in the introduction to Killing Floor, at least in my edition. He starts by talking about reading as a writer: “that yard of books did more for me than provide excellent entertainment. For some reason the McGee books spoke to me like textbooks. I felt I could see what MacDonald was doing, and why, and how, as if I could see the skeleton beneath the skin.”

Continuing to quote, here are some important points:

1. I discovered I was the audience.
2. Character is king. . . . People remember characters.
3. If you can see a bandwagon, it’s too late to get on. . . . I was going to have to do something a little different.
4. You can’t design a character too specifically.

I’ll summarize some of what he says about his third and fourth points. The main character bandwagon Child noticed included a repertory cast, fixed locations, jobs, friends, family, and pets. He wanted a main character that avoided those things.

The danger of designing a character too specifically, Child writes, is becoming bound to a mental checklist and trying to please too many types of readers. Jack Reacher reflects, however, Child’s interests and things he noticed. Finally, he believes characters with a nonchalant, “insouciant self-confidence [form] a more enduring bond” with readers.

From My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk:

We were two men in love with the same woman; he was in front of me and completely unaware of my presence as we walked through the turning and twisting streets of Istanbul, climbing and descending, we traveled like brethren through deserted streets given over to battling packs of stray dogs, passed burnt ruins where jinns loitered, mosque courtyards where angels reclined on domes to sleep, beside cypress trees murmuring to the souls of the dead, beyond the edges of snow-covered cemeteries crowded with ghosts, just out of sight of brigands strangling their victims, passed endless shops, stables, dervish houses, candle works, leathers works and stone walls; and as we made ground, I felt I wasn’t following him at all, but rather, that I was imitating him.

A quick list of techniques I want to try after reading the sentence above:

• Is there something inherently more interesting in long, really long, sentences? See “Baroque, Purple, and Beautiful: In Praise of the Long, Complicated Sentence” by Ed Simon for examples.
• Begin with a general state of affairs that might be resolved in more than one way. Let each word and detail that follows engage readers but deny resolution. End with a surprise or reversal.
• This sentence could be a prompt; specifically, begin with the first phrase and tell the story this sentence tells but in a different location. LA, rather than Istanbul, for example, or the Grand Canyon.
• Explicitly include motion and spatiality in a journey: “He was in front,” “turning and twisting,” “climbing and descending,” “passed,” “beside,” and “beyond.”
• List the mundane (“endless shops, stables, dervish houses, candle works, leathers works and stone walls”), but make the supernatural and religious detailed.
• Consider variations on the first phrase (“We were two women in love with the same man,” “We were two boxers who hated the same manager,” and “We were two teachers hired at the same elementary school,” for example). What implications might follow?

City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky begins so that each chapter is from the point of view of a character who appears, at least briefly, at the beginning of the next chapter. This creates a throughline that draws readers to each chapter and moves them forward to the next. Chapters are short with interesting names, including often the names or concerns of the characters they are narrated by in a close 3^rd person. Suspense results when, for example, an important object goes missing in one chapter. Who took it? It looks like the character who narrates the next chapter, but that ends up not being the case. Readers become at least as interested as the characters in the missing object and who has it.

But Tchaikovsky varies from this strategy later in the novel. In tension with the throughline is a less formal organization. The pattern created early in the novel is varied from later.  Varying from an established pattern reminded me of something Charlie Jane Anders wrote in Never Say You Can’t Survive: “The principle of variable reward teaches us that we’re more likely to get addicted to pushing a lever if we get a peanut only every other time, or every few times. If every time we push the lever, we might get a peanut, an electric shock, or nothing, we’ll keep pushing that lever until it breaks. The same is true for getting yourself hooked, as a reader or writer, on a character’s struggles.”

So, the lesson? Consider structures that begin with comforting consistency but continue with addictive variety.

Consider this description of a writing process at ashmash.com:

The sensationalist way to describe my drafting process is:

• I don’t complete a first draft
• I never draft in order
• I never draft from outline
• My work constantly surprises me
• …And, yet, I never get writer’s block

Now that you’re solidly not on my side, here’s what this actually means.

I encourage you to read the entire post. Descriptions of writing processes always fascinate me. Huang writes well about hers and that leads me to reflect on mine. Trying to capture what we do as we write is good because self-reflection makes improvement more likely and the history or evolution of a process is interesting in itself (at least for me).

Is there a collection of writers’ descriptions of their process or processes? Something like Daily Rituals: How Artists Work edited by Mason Currey but more focused?

I like this quotation from Tana French’s In the Woods: “What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this–two things: I crave truth. And I lie.”

This is an interesting character because, in part, he knows himself well enough to just state an internal tension. Other internal tensions that he might not be as aware of are certainly possible as are external tensions (he’s a police officer). I have not read the whole book yet, but it already suggests a way to complicate characters. The explicit can be as fascinating as the hidden.

I’m enjoying Mick Herron’s Slow Horses novels. Herron carefully controls the information given to readers. He misleads them in interesting ways. Characters die. He’s doing fascinating stuff with spy fiction as a genre. The main character Jackson Lamb is so not James Bond, and he leads a team of spies who have failed and been relegated to “Slough House,” as the rest of the agency calls it. The team has been nicknamed “Slow Horses” by others in the agency.

One technique Herron uses in Dead Lions, the second book of the series, is bookends or “a return with a difference.” The are lots of examples of this technique, from The Hero’s Journey generally to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings specifically. (The hobbits return to The Shire changed and are able to make necessary changes there, for example.)

I think as a way to introduce new readers to the Slow Horses team in Dead Lions, Herron begins with a hypothetical cat sneaking into their base of operations. This hypothetical cat moves from room to room in the shabby building where the Slow Horses work. As readers follow the cat, they learn about different characters as they see how the characters inhabit their offices. Setting characterizes. Also, readers learn about the characters as they see their reactions to a hypothetical cat. I think at least one character feeds the cat. Most ignore it. Jackson Lamb drops it out the widow of his third-story office.

The return with a difference occurs as the novel ends. There is a general summary, but also a mouse that makes its way around Slough House. Like the cat, the mouse observes the characters. Those observations provide closure for character arcs and the closing of those character arcs helps close the narrative generally. In some cases, the presence of the mouse allows for characterization. Jackson Lamb, for example, upon seeing the mouse, says “What Slough House needs is a cat.”

I’ll continue reading this series because it’s compelling, and I find myself learning about writing from it.

“Does the Egg Man bring the Son of Man his eggs?”

“He yet brings him his eggs.”

“How does he like his eggs?”

“Who?”

“Son of Man. How do he like his eggs?”

“I don’t know. You’d have to ask him.”

“I don’t know him,” Nate said.

“It doesn’t matter,” Miggy said. “He knows you.”

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

I checked this book out from the library, but I want to have my own copy. I’ll be buying one soon.

This tiny quotation ends a chapter. It ends that chapter with a mystery as one character knows something that neither readers nor another character knows. Not reading on, especially given the context the rest of the chapter provides, feels impossible to me.

The context consists of Miggy sharing information about her job and eating a slice of pie, which could be catastrophically boring but in McBride’s narrative isn’t. Part of the reason it isn’t boring is because of earlier characterization and who is at stake. But even if the chapter stood alone it would include characters’ reactions to each other. Those reactions provide tension. The dialogue also characterizes, and it reflects tensions between characters, but much of it is long paragraphs of Miggy describing her workplace. Those descriptions matter to readers because of earlier work McBride has done, but also because of the setting as she shares those descriptions and how Miggy uses an element of it: the pie. Finally, the description is interesting because she has reasons to not give it. She’s in favor of how the information she’s presenting might be used, but wary of being the source of it and explicitly presents it in a way she feels will give her deniability. This also adds to the tension. She’s presenting a plan for a rescue. (I’ll avoid spoilers by saying no more.)

There is much more to say about this chapter and this book: the way dialogue characterizes, the implications of names characters give themselves and that characters give each other, how backstories can contain mysteries and move the plot, and how chapters can be structured to hook reads as much as first lines. I highly recommend The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store as a novel but also as a textbook on fiction writing.

Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again.

Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier

This is an appealing first sentence in part because it hints at so many possibilities. Short stories often begin with first sentences that suggest something at risk for a character, or that’s certainly one of my favorite approaches. Some novels start the same way, but here is another technique. Options, enough that a reader literally wonders what will happen next, are another great way to begin and might be an especially good way to start a novel.

Among the options and directions the next sentence could take readers, among the questions the next sentences, paragraphs, and chapters can answer are why is Manderley important enough to dream of, what is Manderley, what is the character’s life like during the day (is it better or worse than their dream), and even what have other dreams (nightmares?) of this person or place been like.

Sharing dreams is also an intimate thing. Readers are immediately invited inside the character’s inner life and into a version of that inner life the character does not control perfectly but that probably has some relationship to their daily life. Dreams characterize. Readers know they are getting something they’ll need to interpret. Characters might offer interpretations of their own dreams (or refuse to interpret them) in ways that reveal who they are to readers. Readers will get to know who this “I” is by reading on.

Journal entries might provide similar invitations into inner lives. Epislatory fiction adds the possibility of an audience and complicates the degree of invitation as a result. A similar first sentence might begin with a dilemma: “My new boyfriend left his journal/laptop/browser open on his desk.” A dilemma like this is an opportunity for intimacy but doesn’t seem an invitation to the same degree of closeness as a dream, at least not to me this morning.

“One of them moved forward with a courteous smile, his hands crossed over his chest like a bishop. He must have been in his early fifties, and his build and spare hair lent him the air of a bird of prey. He had a penetrating gaze and gave off an aroma of fresh eau de cologne and mothballs.”

–Father Fernando Ramos in The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

This is a brief three sentence description of a minor character (I think; I haven’t finished the book yet). Ruiz Zafon descriptions are a strength. In the first sentence, Father Fernando Ramos sets himself apart from a group of priests by moving toward the characters; he also gestures in a way that invites comparison to others higher in the hierarchy. (Does this suggest he is ambitious?) The physical description continues in the second sentence and ends with another comparison, this one more dangerous. It also includes a rhyme and a pun. The third sentence includes another direct description and contrasting (perhaps funny?) sensory details.

In other words, Ramon is created in three sentences with a movement, context (the hierarchy and an attitude toward it), two sets of physical descriptions and comparisons, and a (non-visual) bit of sensory information.

Here is an attempt at something similar: The old man drew his bow slowly over the strings, letting the sound quiet the tavern like the gongs that called the town to prayer. He was at least seventy, spotty in his baldness, his face as blank and his fiddle as steady as stone. He exhaled loudly but slowly and sounded both tired and excited.

(“Tired” and “excited” are both too abstract, but it’s a start.)