Allen Appel

Thriller Guy is taking off for a week and won't be able to blog so he has a few suggestions on how to occupy your visits to this site. First, you might cast back into the archives and find any entries that you may have missed. If you're still mourning Elmore Leonard, check out the first couple of entries where Elmore commented on one of TG's rants. If you haven't read enough articles on Leonard's passing, here's an interesting one by a guy writing in Road and Track magazine about how he learned to hot wire a car from a Leonard book... 

Plus, there are plenty of tips in the archives for those of you who are writing or contemplating writing a thriller or any other book. TG is going to soon start his long awaited Sit Down, Shut Up and Get To Work, the definitive work on the subject.

And why not cruise over to Allen Appel's many eBooks as listed on Amazon. TG is sure you'll find some great reads at bargain prices. Start your odyssey into the world of Alex Balfour, time traveler, with Time After Time, priced at a paltry $.99 or if you've read through the entire series (plus the never-published Sea of Time) you can go to the stand-alone first of a projected series featuring the young Abe Lincoln as a detective. Then there are three terrific novella written around the theme of chickens. TG bets you don't think anyone could write about such a prosaic subject and turn out suspense fiction and heartwarming stories of this order.

So have fun in the archives, show your support by reading Appel's fiction, and TG will see you in a week or so.

Elmore Leonard R.I.P.

Comment in from Dan Stashower, writer: "The guy never dropped a stitch, tried new things in his last years, still appeals to young hip readers.  Amazing."

Thriller Guy agrees. Take the day off everyone.

More Shades of Grey: The Husband

Thriller Guy reviewed E. L. James Fifty Shades of Grey some months ago, saying that he

thought the book was perfectly good and that all the literary types who were savaging the writing were pretty much jealous ninnies who were full of crap. Harsh words perhaps, but steady readers of this blog know by now that TG doesn’t pull his punches and if namby-pamby literary types get beat up in the process, so be it, that’s just the way TG rolls. So when one of TG’s legion of readers passed along a recommendation for the website and blog written by James’ husband, Niall Leonard, TG took a look and agreed: he’s a funny, talented guy. Leonard is a long-time UK television scriptwriter with an impressive resume. He recently published a YA crime novel called Crusher, which has received nice reviews. On Leonard’s blog and website he pretty much sticks with his own views and business, but there are a few entries about what it is like being Mr. E.L. James. One of them was written as a piece for The Guardian and can be found here.

Niall Leonard’s website can be found here. Check it out for his blog and his excellent writing advice. He aims it mostly at screenwriters, but much of it applies to novel writing as well. To get you started, here’s the first paragraph of his funny piece in The Guardian, mentioned above, which can be found on his blog as well.

“If on entering your local bookshop you can find your way past the teetering stacks of EL James' Fifty Shades trilogy, you might come across a slim new crime novel, Crusher. That one's mine. Perceptive reviewers have noted that the hero's father, Maguire, is an embittered Irish hack consumed with envy of his peers. That must be you, they insist. What modern novelist doesn't envy EL James, the 40-something TV executive and mother of two who has outsold Dan Brown and Stieg Larsson, turbo-boosted the turnover of UK bookshops, and left men the world over begging for less sex and more sleep? But my book is a gritty urban murder mystery; Fifty Shades is an erotic romantic fantasy, and I couldn't have written it in a million years. I'm the least romantic fecker that ever lived – ask my wife Erika, aka EL James. Our first Christmas together I bought her a tin opener, and my earliest experience of kinky sex was her trying to shove it up my arse...”

Like TG said, he’s a funny guy. Do TG a favor, somebody out there read his novel Crusher and let us know what it’s like.

A Big Secret Revealed

In this week’s Reaper Report, Thriller Guy is sad to note the passing of Leighton Gage, who

died a couple of days ago. Leighton wrote a series of crime thrillers about a Brazilian cop, Chief Inspector Maria Silva. The books were/are tough, Silva’s ethics elastic, and the Brazilian setting is absolutely original. TG blogged about the covers of his books a while ago, declaring them the best covers of a crime series in the business. He was an excellent writer and a very nice guy. RIP, Leighton Gage.

Back to business: In the last month the popular press has pumped out breathless articles about J. K. Rowling and the fact that she had written a crime novel, The Cuckoo’s Calling, and published it under a pseudonym, Robert Galbraith. Whenever this happens – Stephen King did it famously years ago – normal people get all excited and offer speculation as to why a famous author would do such a thing. TG is not going to go over that ground because it’s stupid: she did it because she’s rich enough to do anything she damn well wants to do as a writer. The point was and is, when the book came out Robert Galbraith received fabulous reviews and sold jack shit in the UK and in the US. And by jack shit (please don’t send TG angry comments about not capitalizing the J in Jack. It’s a close call.) TG means 1,500 copies in the UK and 4,800 copies in the US. Pitiful. Even TG’s alter ego Allen Appel’s novels sell better than that. But when it was discovered that the novel was actually by Rowling, the book shot to the top of the bestseller lists and is selling in the gazillians.

So what does this mean, Thriller Guy?

Mostly it means that much of the reading public is made up of morons who buy books for reasons that have little or no relation having to do with intelligence. Most of them don’t buy books because they might be good, they buy them because the author is famous or infamous or has some other exciting non-publishing attraction. But we already knew that, didn’t we?

The thing that struck TG, and the real point of this blog, was the quote way down the page in one of the stories where some publisher who turned down the book when it was submitted to her, said something like (as always, TG is too lazy to look up the actual quote) “Yes, the book was well written, and yes it was exciting, and yes it was a good mystery, but sometimes a book has to be more than that.” What the lady means is that publishers don’t give a rat’s ass about a book being well written, exciting and a good example of the genre, they just want a hook to hang it on so the fickle public will have a reason to buy it. This is known in the business as “Having a platform.” And the author being famous is the platform they know and love best. If they could only get Britney Spears to write a crime thriller they’d be in heaven.

TG is aware that you, gentle reader, have heard him rant about this before.

Seriously, 4,800 copies sold. TG supposes that sales might have been particularly small because Galbraith, not being a real person and all, wasn’t Twittering or putting his info on Facebook. I’m sure Rowling didn’t want to carry the game that far, though it would have been a lot more interesting had she done so. One of the reasons she didn’t Twitter and Facebbok was that it is a huge pain in the ass to do the sort of social marketing that popular wisdom insists that authors now must do. There’s a funny/sad article on Salon titled Hell is Self Promotion where fiction novelist Sean Beaudoin recounts the pain and misery of having to continually self-promote himself and his books because his publishers aren’t going to spend any money doing so. (Allen Appel agrees with everything Sean has to say and has felt his pain.) All publishers have time to do these days is sit around and rend their garments and whine about how the business has gone to hell, which it has. And why has it gone to hell? Because they arrogantly missed the digital revolution while clinging to the tattered remnants of their 19^th century models of doing business. And now they insist that it is the author’s responsibility to make up their lack of acuteness and foresight by doing all their work for them. Most of the big guys, anyway. There are now small independent publishers who are jumping in where the majors are too stupid to tread and selling books and making money. Good for them and the writers who self-publish and self-promote who are also making money.

So all you folks who are interested in literature or maybe just a good read, get out there and buy a book today, and buy it from a writer or an independent publisher. Do a good deed.

Now here’s a secret. God, TG really didn’t want to have to leak this, but here goes: All of Allen Appel’s books were actually written by James Patterson. Yup. Patterson used this subterfuge to see if readers would love his books if they didn’t have his name on them.

Sorry, Jim, it turns out that readers won’t buy your books without your name on them.

But don't worry, your secret is safe with Thriller Guy.

Your Book's A Page Turner? How Sad For You

Today's Guest Blog comes to us courtesy of Larry Kahaner. Larry, the author of many non-fiction books, including the excellent AK-47: The Weapon that Changed the Face of War, is presently writing a thriller. He and Thriller Guy are writing pals and spend many long lunches delving into the intricacies of the thriller writing process. When TG runs flat up against a seemingly insoluble plot problem, Larry is his go-to guy for an original and clever solution.

This is a true story.

Scene: A creative writers' retreat.

Location: Picnic table among the trees where residents congregate.

One resident, who was writing historical fiction, had her research books in front of her when another resident spied the classic "Caribbean" by James Michener. This other resident had published one book of fiction, 20 years ago, about a young woman and her life in the world of New York publishing. It was autobiographical, sexy and trite. I would tell you her name but she comes from a line of famous authors and it wouldn’t be cool. Suffice it to say that this one-book, non-wonder has been trading on the family name for two decades and bounces around creative centers, hoping to find her muse. She is what's known in the biz as a 'residency slut,' and she would much rather put down the work of others than sit her ass in the chair and pound out a few pages.

Focusing on the Michener tome she says loud enough for everyone around to hear, and in her most condescending voice, "Oh, isn't that just a page turner?"

The historical fiction writer ignored the comment knowing full well that what was meant as a curse was a blessing.

Ask most would-be authors about their main goals and you'll get a ton of answers like this: "entertain…enlighten…write a clever plot… produce compelling characters…"

What they never say is the most important job of a writer, and I offer it here in big type so you can print it out and tack it to your bulletin board or cut and paste it as your screensaver:

 

Get the reader to turn the page.

If you can do that, you have reached your target. Writers write to be read. Period. (The logical extension of being read is that people bought your book. Yeah, that's really the goal: selling books, but that never happens if you're not being read, right?)

And I can prove it (as if this needs proof) by citing the recent survey below.

Almost half of all readers don't finish a book because it's too slow or boring. They didn't turn the page.

So how do you force readers to turn the page?

There are many ways, and for this I turn to television. There's a rule in TV that no scene is static for more than two seconds. After two seconds something has to change. Either the whole scene changes, or, if it’s a close-up, a face grimaces, a voice calls, the camera pans out… something has to change. TV folks know that movement equals interest.

So it is with thrillers. For readers to stay with you, you must provide constant action. Long gone are the days of lengthy descriptions of people and landscapes. No more narratives that don't move the story forward apace. And no longer do readers tolerate protracted internal dialogue (this goes for dreams, too) unless there's movement and action within it.

Use every trick, subterfuge and ploy to get your reader to turn the page and that includes cliff hangers, kicker-quote questions and bullets fired but have not yet reached their target – and may not.

 

Be brave. Be sneaky. Be clever. Do anything that works. Nothing is off limits except what I call the "Superman Tease." As a boy I read Superman comic books as fast as they were printed. The covers drew me in as they promised that Superman was going to die, or he would destroy the earth or Lois Lane and the Man of Steel would marry. Once paying my money and unable to wait, I read it on the street, only to discover that the story took place in an alternative universe, it was a dream or it was a bad guy in a Superman mask. Tease.

Although I was unsatisfied and angry at how I was cheated, I continued to buy the comics until I got older and was tired of being fooled.

Don't tease your readers without a satisfying payoff.

Otherwise feel free to wheedle, cajole, sweet talk and coax them into turning the page.

Do what you gotta do.

And that's all you gotta do.

            

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?