More On First and Last Lines

After finishing up the Five (or so) Mistakes Thriller Writers make, Thriller Guy is instituting some new changes in the blog. TG is going to try and make the entries shorter and more varied and post much more often. He is also going to allow AdSense to put up ads as it should prove at least mildly interesting as to what they choose. If what they do annoys TG, he will take them down. TG wants everyone to know that he is in no way asking you to click on anything you aren’t interested in.

In the last several posts, TG has addressed the difficulties and possibilities of the opening and ending lines of a manuscript or book. Several interesting additions came in over the last several days. Yesterday, TG listened to Bob Edwards interviewing Clive Cussler on

Edwards’ XM Radio show. Clive sounded like what he is, a mega-selling thriller writer who’s been around a lot of years who simply tries to give readers the types of stories they like to read. He answered a question I’ve been interested for a while: How does he work with the writers who write his books with (or maybe for) him? He said he first has the writer come to his place and they hash out a plot and an ending to aim for. Note the itals: “and an ending to aim for.” So if you want to make money like Clive, it’s way smart to have your ending before you even start writing.

Stephen King has a new article in The Atlantic titled: Why Stephen King Spends ‘Months and Even Years’ Writing Opening Sentences. TG recommends the article to all writers and offers a couple of quick quotes.

“An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You

want to know about this.”

“But for me, a good opening sentence really begins with voice. You hear people talk about "voice" a lot, when I think they really just mean "style." Voice is more than that. People come to books looking for something. But they don't come for the story, or even for the characters. They certainly don't come for the genre. I think readers come for the voice.”

“My favorite example is from Douglas Fairbairn's novel, Shoot, which begins with a confrontation in the woods. There are two groups of hunters from different parts of town. One gets shot accidentally, and over time tensions escalate. Later in the book, they meet again in the woods to wage war -- they re-enact Vietnam, essentially. And the story begins this way:

“This is what happened.”

“For me, this has always been the quintessential opening line. It's flat and clean as an affidavit. It establishes just what kind of speaker we're dealing with: someone willing to say, I will tell you the truth. I'll tell you the facts. I'll cut through the bullshit and show you exactly what happened. It suggests that there's an important story here, too, in a way that says to the reader: and you want to know.”

“When I'm starting a book, I compose in bed before I go to sleep. I will lie there in the dark and think. I'll try to write a paragraph. An opening paragraph. And over a period of weeks and months and even years, I'll word and reword it until I'm happy with what I've got. If I can get that first paragraph right, I'll know I can do the book.”

“A book won't stand or fall on the very first line of prose -- the story has got to be there, and that's the real work. And yet a really good first line can do so much to establish that crucial sense of voice -- it's the first thing that acquaints you, that makes you eager, that starts to enlist you for the long haul. So there's incredible power in it, when you say, come in here. You want to know about this. And someone begins to listen.”

All this talk about first lines got TG – or rather his alter ego, Allen Appel – thinking about his own first lines. So he went and looked up the first chapter and the first line of the book he’s now writing, the sixth book in his Pastmaster Series. Here it is:

“Alex Balfour stood at the second-story window and watched as the one woman and three men who were about to die were walked out into the courtyard and up onto the scaffolding where they would shortly hang.”

Not bad. It will probably get some tweaking on the many rounds of rewrites coming up, but all in all it fills the bill for an evocative first sentence and an indication of the voice of the writer. What do you think? Any comments? Any first lines of your own or other favorite writers?

The Five Mistakes Thriller Writers Make. Number Five, Part One: The Methods of Mayhem

Update: The Grim Reaper has had a good few days. First he got James Gandolfini and now he's taken Vince Flynn. Thriller Guy was not a huge Flynn fan, either of his novels or his politics, but plenty of folks loved his books and he didn't deserve to be taken so young. Nor did Gandolfini. Nor does anyone else, for that matter.

On with the show...

In the not-so long ago past, an author could write a thriller about a lone assassin who is targeting the leader of a country and there would be plenty of action and thrills: Would the assassin succeed? Would the leader live or die? That was enough structure to build a thriller around: one bullet.

Today, it would never be enough. Readers want their plots big, their characters – both villains and heroes --  oversize, and their payoffs even bigger. If the entire world isn’t threatened, don’t even bother.

So in today’s lesson, (which has grown too large and unruly, so will thus be split into two segments) TG will attempt to answer that all-important question: How do you destroy the world? What’cha got for me Mr. Thriller Writer? An earth-destroying machine? An army of cyborgs? Mutants? A virus? Nukes? Aliens?  Earthquakes? Fire? Floods?

Yawn. Really, is that the best you can do? Hasn’t TG already seen all of these, most of them many times?

First of all, TG would like to excoriate all the recent books being penned by celebrity weathermen and women. These books are almost always written with the aid of veteran thriller writers and usually include a gushing note from the publisher declaring the book “could only be written by an author with insider knowledge.” Cue the hurricane, tsunami, flood, tornado and global warming machines, crank those babies up from your island hideaway laboratory, or undersea laboratory, or deep in a massive cave laboratory, and sit back to reap the benefits of a destroyed world. (Whatever those may be.) TG has written several times about these “Insider” failures, but he is reserving a special place in hell for the weathermen. The writing is usually terrible, particularly if the weatherfolk decide to write the book themselves. Even when they have help, the ghosts and co-authors write like they know the cause is doomed, but they’re going to soldier on because everyone needs a paycheck. And yet publishers continue to clutch at this thin straw, hoping for a payday fueled by a celebrity author. Here’s a tip for these publishers: No one gives a shit about weathermen! So unless they can come up with something new, stop shoveling them giant advances that would more deservedly go to TG and his pals. And readers, stop buying these boring copy-cat second-rate thrillers. You deserve better.

How did we come to this pass, where only the most massive, literally earth-shaking threat can titillate our jaded psyches? TG feels it was a two-step process. First, the escalation of the villains to super status, and then the tools of destruction had to grow to earth-shattering proportions to match the villains. Fortunately, nuclear physics came along just in time to achieve weapons of the proper magnitude.

Consider, Ian Fleming and his creation, James Bond. I’m sure that TG will get mail from thriller aficionados pointing to earlier examples of earlier super villains, but TG thinks that in Fleming’s second novel, Live and Let Die (can’t you hear the theme music just when you read the title?) the introduction of the arch villain, Mr. Big, who, of course, lives on an island in the Caribbean, was the beginning of a long line of hugely evil and destructive villains. Big is an agent of the Russian secret agency, SMERSH, whose goal is to destroy America and thereby Rule the World. There are as yet no super weapons, but the first nuclear ICBM appears in the next novel. Moonraker.  First the villains became outsize, then writers had to manufacture weapons and means of destruction that equaled the villains wielding them.

Sidebar: TG believes that most of this came about because of the Bond films rather than the novels, and in fact some of the novels were actually novelizations of film scripts. Because the films demanded bigger payoffs and bigger action scenes, the novels had to reflect that need. And you can trust TG on this, it’s a lot easier to write bigger explosions than it is to write more compelling characters or come up with more original situations. This fact has not been lost on many of the thriller writers working the genre today.

 Just a list of the Bond villains reminds us of their virtual and fictional size: Mr. Big, Dr. No (6 feet six inches tall with steel flippers for hands), Goldfinger, Oddjob, and  Blofeld, just to name a few. And we can't forget Jaws as pictured at the top of the blog. In Thunderball, SPECTRA, Blofeld’s crime organization, has stolen two nuclear bombs and intends to destroy two British cities, in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Blofeld threatens England with biological agents. Big plots and big weapons.

Since the escalation by the Bond books, perhaps the most influential perpetrator of World-Threatening Destruction is Clive Cussler. TG has reviewed many Cussler books, and while he doesn’t think they are all stellar, they do all have a certain, well, bigness that deserves admiration if nothing else. Of the recent series penned with co-authors (TG is not going to get into a discussion of who writes what on a Cussler book) the Dirk Pitt series remains strong, as do the Numa Files. The Oregon Files, about a supership, The Oregon, disguised to look like a tramp steamer, is solidly right in familiar Cussler territory and each new entry goes down easily enough. TG finds one of the newer series, The Isaac Bell books about an early 20^th century private investigator, to be kind of boring, but even that series has gotten better over time. TG’s favorite Cussler books are the latest, the Fargo books, about a couple who do archeological work and always get embroiled in dangerous situations. A quick look at some of the plots of most of these books in any of the series will show you the vast breadth of the ideas Cussler (or someone) comes up with. Because these books are so outrageous and complex, TG will only mention a few and a brief outline of their premises:

Pacific Vortex… A sunken fortress has been a lair of evildoers who have been preying on ships, (think Bermuda Triangle) for 30 years.

 Deep Six… The president of the US is kidnapped and brainwashed in the Soviet Union. He is returned to the White House where he begins a program of billion dollar loans to the USSR and turning over our secrets to them.

Cyclops… A group of wealthy industrialists have formed a secret colony on the moon. An upcoming war with the Soviets threatens to destroy the earth.

Dragon… A third nuclear bomb being sent to bomb Japan at the end of WWII is shot down. Modern day Japanese want to destroy the US economy through the use of nuclear weapons.

Sahara… Lincoln is kidnapped at the end of the Civil War and ends up in the Sahara desert in a Confederate ironclad buried in the sand. A red tide threatens to destroy the oceans of the world and thus, the earth itself.

Shock Wave… An intense soundwave is being used to destroy the island of Oahu.

Atlantis Found… Bad guys are using nanotechnology to separate the Ross Ice Shelf from the Antarctic mainland in order to unbalance the planet and flood the world. The evildoers intend to ride out the disaster in their superships and then recreate civilization in the Nazi image.

You get the point. If you want a complete description of the dastardly plots in all their complexity go to the Clive Cussler page on Wikipedia and read the plot summaries of scores of these books.

Here’s the takeaway, Thriller Writers. Unless your writing is so good you can seize readers with your dazzling ability, or if your story is so original that readers will gasp in amazement at your brilliance, you’re going to have to come up with a fairly novel method of mayhem, or a unique twist on an existing global threat. To do that, TG is gonna give you the same piece of advice he’s given you before: read the classics, know what’s gone before. You can’t come up with a twist on something if you don’t know what that something is.

And enough with the damn suitcase nukes.

And no more weathermen, ever.

Next up: TG discusses Dan Brown and his imitators and shows that it is possible to come up with Something New.

Old Plots, New Plots

This turned out to be a long entry so Thriller Guy is going to break it up into two. He'll be putting the other half up in a few days.

TG has spoken many times about the difficulties in coming up with great plot ideas. Oh, how many times have the Little Ones gathered at his knee and pleaded, (pled?) “Oh, TG, tell us your secret, how can we too come up with killer plot ideas?” Constant readers of TG's thoughts know that he is a big fan of Gin when it comes this question, and he ascribes to the Four Bs of Creative Cognition – that's Bed, Bath, Beach and Bus – which are great places for ideas to suddenly spring into one's head. Don't forget to keep that notebook somewhere close so when brilliance strikes in the middle of the night you can get up and write your brainstorms down. If any of you pros out there would like to share your secrets vis-a-vis plot concoction, send them in and Thriller Guy will post them for the edification of us all.

TG reads a ton of books, and most of them are running through the same old plots, mash-ups and ripoffs. As he pointed out in last week's entry, he is heartily sick of Da Vinci Code imitators and all their secret codes and other paraphernalia. TG understands that there is a solid core of readers who love this sub genre and he is happy to point them to the best (and warn them away from the worst) of this material, because that's TG's job, but personally, he's mighty tired of these books. Most of the military adventure genre are still cranking out copies of Tom Clancy and Larry Bond, although the spy books are being refreshed by a new bunch of British writers who are using terrific writing to reestablish themselves as the heirs to not only le Carre (though le Carre is still writing beautifully) but all the other classic espionage guys.

But instead of continuing to rail against the paucity of today's plots, TG is going to reprise an old plot and give you some new ones he likes over the last year's reading.

Clive Cussler used to be the master of the over-the-top, bizarro plot. He's still cranking them out (plots, that is) but back in the day when he was probably still actually writing his own books he really stretched the limits of credulity, even when most readers are/were happy to suspend their disbelief. Take for example, the plot of Cussler's 1992 Sahara. Click here if you really want a long Wikipedia dissection of this complicated plot, but let TG summarize...

It's 1865 and the Confederate ship CSS Texas takes on a special prisoner and fights her way out through a Union blockade. Flash forward to 1931 when Kitty Mannock is flying over the Sahara in an attempt to set a new aviation record. She crashes into the dessert and records in her diary finding an “odd ship in the sand.” Enter Cussler hero Dirk Pitt (still going strong today) who is in Egypt searching for the source of a strange pollutant that is causing an overgrowth of red tide that, dare we say it, threatens the existence of the world. Much mayhem ensues as Dirk is taken captive, escapes, taken captive again, escapes again, builds a wind powered sand yacht out of pieces of Mannock's airplane, then...

OK, TG is too tired to go on. Suffice it to say that it turns out that Abraham Lincoln is the prisoner on the CSS Texas and he and the ship itself have ended up in the desert. That guy who got shot in Ford's Theatre? That was an actor who was hired by Edwin M. Stanton.

The point is, it's one hell of a plot. It must taken a serious amount of gin to come up with it. Crazy? Lincoln captured by the south and the ship carrying him away ends up in the Sahara desert? Totally whacky. But Cussler pulls it off because he's not afraid to plunge ahead in the face of believability through sheer balls and a story that refuses to slow down. Could you pull off like this today? Hard to say. Maybe. TG is happy to read what you come up with.

Next up: More about Cussler and his son and co-writer Dirk Cussler (yes, he named his kid after his series hero) and three new plots TG thinks are pretty cool.

I, Writer

Anonymous' writer's screed (see previous blog) stirred up a swarm of comments, some of which are posted below the entry. Obviously there are a lot of hurtin' scriveners out there; TG once again invites them to use this space to unload any excess baggage they're carrying, vis-a-vis the writing trade.

Commenter Morgan asks the question: “In your experience, was writing an avocation before it became a vocation, and if so, does it now mean that 'the thrill is gone'? For a young buck such as myself who enjoys writing but would not enjoy the stresses associated with typing my dollars, is the take away message to court writer's block and other fictitious problems, rather than face the misery of real problems like deadlines and unemployment?”

Writing was certainly never an avocation for TG. It was a career move occasioned by the stark fact that his work as a free-lance illustrator/photographer (FLI/P) was never going to bring in much in the way of real money. So, one day whilst sitting in the Washington Post newsroom after turning in a job, he looked around and realized that he was just as smart as most of the rest of the people in the room, so why not take up the writing trade? Flash forward six or eight months and the first draft of Cross, a thriller about a human/chimpanzee baby was born, so to speak. The book never saw publication, but it garnered a ton of terrific rejection letters and led directly to TG's first published novel, Time After Time. If anyone is interested, TG will be glad to relate the tale of the writing of Cross at greater length, as it's somewhat instructive, but the point is, TG approached it as a job, the skills for which were learnable, realizing that as long as one worked hard enough and stuck to it, writing might eventually bear fruit. In short, a vocation, Morgan, to answer your question. TG finds it hard to imagine writing to be fun enough to be an avocation. Luckily, TG turned out to be pretty good at it, or at least as good as most writers, so that's what he does for a living. As far as the last part of your question, there's no need to invent excuses to not write -- just don't do it. If you're the sort of person who enjoys the process and has no need of gratification in terms of money, keep at it. Someday, like love, when you least expect it, success, fame and fortune may descend upon you.

But probably not.

TG's wife (MTG) recently pointed out that these pages were becoming too “inside baseball” and there needed to be more about actual thrillers. So, here are some books that came out this month or are due to come out in December.


And for an interesting assessment of TG's opinion of the Vachss book, read the comment section at the end of the blog.

What Thriller Guy Is Reading.

Andrew Vachss has a new book out and TG wishes he could recommend it, but, alas, he cannot. Haiku. Pantheon, $24.95 (224p) Anyone else out there remember how great the Burke series was when Vachss had a few of them under his belt? Then they slowly started to get weird and just not very good. This one seemed like it was going to work (it's a stand-alone, not a Burke) until Vachss does a very strange thing. He starts off with an intriguing plot about a white Rolls that plunges into the sea off the end of a pier. A group of homeless guys are the heroes, in particular Ho, an elderly martial arts teacher who has rejected worldly goods and taken to the streets. He and the other homeless guys decide to solve the mystery of the white Rolls, then about two-thirds of the way through the book Vachss switches plots to one far less interesting. Why did he do that? I think he couldn't figure out the plot himself and just gave up. This leads to interesting blog topics about such matters as knowing the ending of your book before you begin writing, outlining, etc. Maybe we'll get to them one of these days. There are a few lame excuses as to why the hero suddenly abandons the mystery, but it just doesn't work. Vachss has a deep track record of many published books, so someone, his agent? his publisher? his editor? doesn't seem to have had the balls to tell him the whole plot thing was bogus. If it had been you or TG who tried this stunt, they would have taken back the advance and never published the book.

Mariposa. Greg Bear, Vanguard, $25.95 (352p). Most readers know Bear from his lifelong science fiction work, but he seems to be attempting to break into thrillers with this, the second in a series after Quantico. Set in the near future, the Texas based Talos Corporation helmed by CEO Axel Price is attempting to take control of the US. A few hardy FBI agents are trying to stop him. Chief among Price's weapons is the mind-altering drug, Mariposa. It's all pretty cool and Bear's excellent science fiction chops add plenty of realism to the gadgets and future science.

The Wrecker. Clive Cussler and Justin Scott, Pantheon, $27.95 (480p). TG likes a lot of the recent Cussler, but this series that features trains in the Olde West, not so much. Isaac Bell is an investigator for the legendary Van Dorn Detective Agency and this time out he's chasing a fiend known as The Wrecker, who has been destroying trains and railroad facilities, particularly in the West. The writing takes its style after early Dime Novels, which is a bit off-putting. If you've got a thing for trains, you'll probably love these books.

Here's a particularly good one, coming out at the end of December: I, Sniper. Stephen Hunter, Simon and Schuster, $26.00 (432p) TG likes Hunter's writing in general, even his movie reviews in the Washington Post, now, sadly gone since he took an early retirement deal. This latest is part of the excellent Bob Lee Swagger series. Swagger is a simple, home-spun sort of guy who chases evildoers and kills them dead without any blubbering introspection. Here, an unknown sniper is gunning down folks who were big in the 1960's peace movement. In a puzzling structure move, Hunter bases these characters on real-life people, only changing their names slightly. Think Jane Fonda, Vietnam War sniper Carlos Hathcock (here known as Carl Hitchcock) and others. It's kind of a bold move, and TG isn't sure it really works, but the rest of the book is terrific. In other venues about other books, TG has stated that Hunter writes the best gunfight scenes in the business, an opinion that he stands by in spades after this new novel.

If anyone out there wants any of these books, send a comment to TG and he'll send it to you. Please, just one book per customer. TG makes this offer because he values his readers and because he's drowning in books and will actually pay postage just to get them out of the house. That is if TG can actually find the requested book in the giant pile. TG promises nothing, but he'll make the attempt.