Blog – Page 4

November 14, 2017 By Joyce Simons

Does Where You Write Influence What You Write?

I used to work for a boss who told me that she could put me in the middle of a minefield and it wouldn’t keep me from doing my job. But not everyone is as insensitive to their surroundings as I used to be. In fact, I’ve become quite sensitive to them. Right now, there’s a thunderstorm brewing outside my window and though it’s still daytime, it looks like night out there. I can hear the rataplan of raindrops being beaten against my window by the same high winds that just toppled my rose arbor. It’s the perfect climate for killing someone on the page. And since my surroundings are cozy, I’ll be carrying out that activity in a manner consistent with cozy mysteries (no graphic sex or violence).

But what if I were in a different setting? If I were sitting in room piled high with Victoriana, might I be writing about dropping arsenic in a teacup? Would a beach house with an ocean view inspire me to introduce a man-eating shark into my story? Would some dark and dank corner of a concrete jungle entice me to stick a hypodermic needle in someone’s arm?

In other words, does where we write influence what we write?

According to an article on TheAtlantic.com, it took F. Scott Fitzgerald nearly a decade to finish Tender Is the Night, in part because his peripatetic lifestyle kept him bouncing around continents. When he finally settled in one place, he wrote in “dark, disheveled rooms with a bottle of gin in a nearby drawer.” That could easily explain why his novel is so bleak. The Wikipedia article about it claims the bleakness reflects the darkest years of the author’s life. But it could also be argued that it reflects the darkness of his surroundings as well.

The article on TheAtlantic.com cites various papers and studies that examine the effects of one’s surroundings on one’s creativity. Here’s a quick recap of the elements that can stimulate your creativity:

Darkness
Plentiful noise
Plentiful booze
Dim lighting
A messy desk
No desk
Disorder
Ambient noise similar to what you’d hear at your local Starbucks
Rooms with high ceilings

The article also suggests that writing by hand, taking a walk, and getting a little drunk can promote abstract thinking, which is so critical to creativity, especially if your starting point is “What if?”

Of course, your environment can’t make you creative if you’re not creative in the first place—all it can do is inspire and enhance. As Fitzgerald wrote, “You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner.”

So I vote yes, where we write influences what we write. But you be the judge. Check out this amusing compilation of famous authors’ bedrooms and decide which decorative style inspires you most:

https://www.homeadvisor.com/r/literary-home-decor-ideas-from-8-famous-writers-bedrooms/

Thanks this week go to the wonderful folks who run the Writers’ Studio at Bainbridge Artisan Resource Network (BARN). It’s always a pleasure to pop in for a workshop, panel discussion, or writer’s salon. And it’s the folks at BARN who first introduced me to the floor plans of famous writers’ bedrooms. Hope you enjoy looking at them as much as I did!

October 30, 2017 By Joyce Simons

A Brief History of Private Investigation

Earlier this month, I started attending classes for the Certificate in Private Investigation at the University of Washington. It was recommended to me by crime novelist and program graduate Ingrid Thoft, and I’m told by the organizers that it’s the only program of its kind in the U.S. My goal is to learn the investigative techniques that my protagonist, amateur detective Maxime Martin, will need to catch a killer. But I’m learning so much more and we’re just three classes into the program.

For instance, did you know that in the criminal justice system…

The truth has no bearing on a trial. The burden of proof is on the prosecution to prove the elements of its case beyond a reasonable doubt. The job of the defense is to cast doubt on one or more of those elements, and thus compel a jury to render a verdict of Not Guilty. The defendant’s job in all this is to let his or her attorney do their job. The “what really happened” story is of no consequence and could very well remain a mystery during a trial and long after it ends.
The police investigate crimes on behalf of the prosecution. Private investigators, if they’re involved at all, typically work for the defense.
The police stop investigating when they think they’ve found what they were looking for. If they believe a victim died from a gunshot wound and they find a smoking gun, they call it a day. But what if the victim actually died of poisoning and the gunshot just covered up that fact? Private investigators tend to pick up where the police leave off, almost like a murder of crows picking over the detritus of a crime scene. Find the poison, and the prosecution’s entire case can be thrown into question.

The tagline for the UW program is: Uncover the Facts and Expose the Truth. Which feels so poignant now that I know what I just listed above. It’s not the job of the prosecutor, the defense attorney, the judge, or the jury to uncover the truth; that job belongs to the private investigator. Writing novels that lay out a crime, untangle a mystery, and expose the truth just got a whole lot more satisfying.

A happy consequence of learning about the function of private investigation is that I started wondering how it got its start. (Being a lover of history, digging into the origins of something is an activity I relish.) I always assumed that it all began with Sherlock Holmes.

How wrong I was!

Eugène François Vidocq

The first known private investigation agency was opened in 1833 by a Frenchman, Eugène François Vidocq, who accepted money in exchange for solving crimes.

Eugène François Vidocq

He made the first plaster casts of shoe prints. He ran a printing company that created indelible ink. And, like the kindly Bishop Myriel in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, he didn’t turn in people who committed crimes motivated by real need.

Allen Pinkerton

Seventeen years later in the U.S., Allen Pinkerton started his own detective agency and rose to fame when he foiled a plot to assassinate President-Elect Abraham Lincoln.

Allen Pinkerton

At one point, the Pinkerton Detective Agency had more agents than the U.S. Army and was consequently outlawed in some states because it could be hired as a “private army.” Which is exactly what happened when it was hired as strikebreakers and bounty hunters (of Jesse James, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, among others). Its motto was We Never Sleep, which inspired the term, “private eye.”

But what about private investigators in fiction? Surely, they can be traced back to Sherlock, can’t they?

Wrong again! The beginnings of detective fiction can be traced all the way back to the Bible. Here’s a brief rundown of what you can read about in detail in a Wikipedia article on detective fiction:

Ancient literature

Read the Old Testament story of Susanna and the Elders, and it’ll sound a bit like a case of he-said-she-said. But when Daniel inserts himself and cross-examines the two witnesses, the truth is uncovered, the false accusers are condemned to death, and justice reigns. Similar stories of detection can be found in Oedipus Rex by Sophocles in which Oedipus uses cross-examination to uncover the murder of King Laius (never mind that his efforts implicate himself in the murder), The Three Apples narrated by Scheherazade in the Arabian Nights (which could be subtitled Two Fall Guys and a Guilty Slave), and Gong’an fiction of Ancient China (in which the detective is the local magistrate).

Early modern literature and beyond

Not surprisingly, another Frenchman pops up in history as a pioneer in private investigation.

Voltaire

In 1747, Voltaire’s novella Zadig ou la Destinée (Zadig, or the Book of Fate) appeared and seems to have influenced countless mystery novelists who followed, from Edgar Allen Poe (who is credited with having established the detective fiction genre with The Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1841), to Arthur Conan Doyle (creator of Sherlock Holmes and his trusted chronicler, Dr. Watson), to Queen of Crime Agatha Christie, who presided over the Golden Age of Detective Fiction during the 1920s and 1930s.

In the years that followed, hardboiled novels replaced classic whodunits in popularity (think Dashiell Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner, Raymond Chandler, etc.), until the 21^st century when Michael Collins ushered in the PI series of the Modern Age.

For me personally, given all the authors, genres, and subgenres through the ages, there’s something irresistible about reading a great cozy mystery, and it has nothing to do with drinking tea (which I don’t drink) or owning cats (which I’m allergic to). What lies at the heart of a “cozy” is a mystery that needs solving without the overdone window dressing of graphic sex or violence, and takes the reader along for the adventure.

If I’m lucky, my KNITTING DETECTIVE series will one day appear on the list of “Detective debuts and swansongs” at the bottom of the Wikipedia article on detective fiction. And then I can say it all started with A SCANDAL IN NICE and the ending is TBD because Maxime will be making stops in Lyon (in book two) and Versailles (in book three) before taking up his beautifully crafted knitting needles in-between unraveling a few skeins of luxurious yarns and unraveling his next big mystery.

Thanks this week go to fellow student at the UW and published mystery author Marianne Harden, who is filling my commute with invaluable advice about finding representation, and who has become my partner in crime in exercising our powers of observation as writers to decipher the private lives of our instructors. (But let’s keep that last factoid just between us!)

October 15, 2017 By Joyce Simons

Are You Different in Different Languages?

If you speak more than one language, you may have noticed that the way you present yourself to others varies depending on which language you’re speaking.

For instance, I’m a confident speaker of my mother tongue (English). I consider myself articulate and, being a native New Yorker, there’s a certain boppity-bop-bop to the way I speak. When I recently asked a group of friends for a list of adjectives that best describe my personality, “direct” bubbled to the top, which is consistent with my speech style. I tend not to beat around the bush.

But when I asked my French friends to do the same, their list was surprisingly different. According to them, when I speak French I come across as “cheerful.” Hmm, how did “direct,” which I sometimes have to temper lest I inadvertently say something that rubs someone the wrong way, morph into “cheerful?” I like to think I’m fluent in French. But I make frequent mistakes, struggle occasionally to find the right word, and almost always laugh at my foibles. So there’s a certain amount of humility that plays into my forays in la francophonie. Hence, my cheerfulness.

Eiffel Tower

Expressing your style in written French presents a whole new set of challenges. According to one of my former French professors, the French language has 30% fewer words than the English language. So what we anglophones might sum up in an adjective might be said in French with a verb phrase, for instance. And even when you can find an appropriate word-for-word translation, it often doesn’t sound like something a native French speaker would say or write. Oh la la.

A couple of years ago, a Parisian friend living in Nice came up with the idea to publish an anthology of short stories (nouvelles, in French, not courtes contes, which translates literally as “short stories” but is more accurately translated as the nonsensical “limited fairytales”). Each story would be a first-hand account of how a world-famous monument came to be. She gathered a group of writers from the countries where the monuments are located, and went to work assigning one monument to each of us. She found a French-speaking Egyptian to write about the Great Pyramids, a Parisian to write about the Eiffel Tower, etc.

But when it came time to write about the Statue of Liberty, she told me that another writer— who was only half-American— wanted to write it. So I told her how I had an unobstructed view of the statue from my home in Brooklyn Heights, NY. That’s all she needed to hear: I got the assignment (the other writer was assigned Big Ben), and she gave me the option to write it in either English or French. I chose English and produced a short story whose tone blended an appropriately woe-is-me attitude with some home-brewed NYC snark. As soon as she read what I had written, she asked me to write the French version. Zut alors!

Here are just a few of the challenges I faced:

Research shows that French translations are about 15-20% longer than their original English text. So if you’re trying to match or fall below your English word count, good luck with that.
There are three clearly defined levels of French: familiar, standard, and soutenu, or formal. In English, we have one. So when translating from English to French, you have to choose the appropriate level for the text and be consistent within it.
French is rife with faux amis, or false friends. What might seem like an accurate translation could end up having a completely opposite meaning. For instance, if you feel “blessed” in English, let’s hope you’re not blessé in French because it means you’re injured.
While there are myriad ways to say something in English, there may be just one way to say the same thing in French. And that one way might have more than one meaning. For example, French may be considered the “language of love” but the word for “love” (aimer) is the same as the word for “like.” Je t’aime means “I love you.” But if you want to say, “I like you,” you’d say je t’aime bien, where bien means “well.” So loving someone well means you like them. Go figure.

My favorite adventure in translation came at the end of my Statue of Liberty story, in which the last line made it clear that Lady Liberty may have been born in France, but she has become a dyed-in-the-wool, potty-mouthed New Yorker. Which presented two new challenges. First, French people seem to think that New Yorkers are elegant folk. The only thing plus chic than being Parisian is being New Yorkais. But in my experience, scratch the surface of anyone born and raised in the tri-state area, and you’ll find a hint of vulgarity beneath even the most elegant veneer. Second, after I toned down the vulgarity of my last sentence at my friend’s request, I had to find a decent translation for “No one messes with Lady Liberty.” (You can easily guess which verb I originally chose.) The problem was that there’s no obvious translation for “mess with.” So I asked some of my French friends for their ideas, and the result was an exercise in hilarity.

Here are some of the options we came up with, translated word-for-word from French:

Whore, don’t touch Lady Liberty.
Don’t joke around with Lady Liberty.
If you look for Lady Liberty, you’ll find me.

In the end, we agreed to go with option 2, though I pushed hard for the infinitely more vulgar option 1 because it packs a punch that the other two don’t.

So there you have it. I may be direct in spoken English and cheerful in spoken French, but I lean toward vulgarity in written French. Merci mille fois to my friend Iveline de Normandie for teaching me these things about myself and for bringing our anthology of monument stories to life. If you want to read it, it’s available on Amazon in English (as The Wisdom of Monuments) and in French (as La Sagesse des Monuments). And if you do read it, please post a review on Amazon or send me comments because I love the feedback— especially if you want to propose an alternative translation for that last line. Just don’t be surprised if the style of your translation says more about you than you imagined!

September 30, 2017 By Joyce Simons

If Patience is a Virtue, Call Me a Sinner

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve sent out about a dozen query emails in search of a literary agent. I diligently researched each agent to make sure they were a good fit for my novel. I reviewed their recent deals to make sure they place their authors with established publishing houses. I read their tweets and any mention of them on industry websites to make sure I’ll enjoy working with my dream agent for the long haul.

And just when I was gearing up to cast my net farther and wider to draw in a fresh batch of agents to query, my editor suggested I stop and wait. Better to get feedback from the agents I already queried than to keep on querying.

Say what?

They say that patience is a virtue. But they also say that God helps those who help themselves. So which is it? And is it an either/or? Or is it a matter of helping yourself as far as a sensible stopping point, and then patiently waiting for the universe to do its bit?

When I attended the Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference earlier this month, I asked some of the bestselling authors I met how they found representation at the start of their careers. One author told me she wrote her first novel, queried one agent, and got a deal. They say that never happens. But it happened to her, though she ended up being unhappy with her agent and they parted ways before long. Another author told me she wrote her first novel, queried about 200 agents, and didn’t hear a peep for two years. But when someone did peep, it was with the offer of a two-book deal, and all these years later she’s still happy with her agent.

There’s a lesson in there. The first agent I queried told me she’s “not into” the subgenre of crime novels I write, so I’ve already received my first rejection. And the idea of querying hundreds more agents makes me want to defenestrate. So I’m choosing the middle road. A couple dozen agents, a few weeks of waiting, and then we’ll see what happens next. But how do I make my waiting period feel more like time spent in purgatory than in hell?

Now you might be thinking that a few weeks (which could easily stretch into a few months) isn’t such a long time. But it all depends on how you look at it. One of the other people I met at Book Passage was a criminal judge. During a panel discussion, she and her fellow panelists shared examples of how books, TV shows, and movies get the process of crime and punishment wrong. So naturally, I had to ask her for an example of it done right. She told me about a seven-part HBO series called The Night Of. Off I went to my local library to check it out. In episode one, the protagonist wakes up to the bloody corpse of the woman he met just hours earlier. In episode seven, the criminal trial ends. That means that for at least five episodes, we see the protagonist in prison. Waiting. And not just any prison. He’s on Rikers Island, which is the big leagues. During that time, he distracts himself with some less-than-savory activities and balances it by pumping iron. One of those activities is getting the letters “S I N” tattooed on his fingers. Clearly, I’m not the only one who struggles with the idea that patience is a virtue.

from the HBO series, The Night Of — from the HBO series, *The Night Of*

A wise friend recently urged me to find an activity completely different from killing people on the page to distract me while I attempt to practice this virtue. This week, I start “private eye” school, which doesn’t qualify as a distraction because my goal is to learn how to kill people on the page more convincingly. (Check back for updates in the coming weeks as the program unfolds).

But then a curious thing happened, as it often does. A friend with whom I worked years ago reached out to me to find out if I wanted to dip a toe back in hi tech. That type of work exercises the other half of my brain and gives me balance. Evidently, when I spend too much time writing novels, I’m “icky to be around.” Good grief. But after working for a tech giant for over two decades, did I really want to navigate those waters again? And then this friend told me about the startup he just joined — a little fish in a big pond, as it were — that’s tackling a problem near and dear to my heart. In my experience, tech + heart is a rare combination that I find irresistible.

So what started out as a looming sense of dread for waiting (I used the words “purgatory” and “hell” to describe it, after all) has turned into a little slice of heaven. I’ve already begun sketching out my new novel (set in Lyon!). Next week I dive into my studies in private investigation. And the week after, I start my new assignment at the little fish startup. And I cannot wait to immerse myself in all three.

If you read my Sam Shepard story in my blog post, If You’re Planning to Kill Someone, Learn How to Do It Right, then you may recall my writing that if you set your intention, the universe often gives you what you need even if it doesn’t match what you think you want. I’ve done my bit to research and query a carefully curated selection of agents, and now I get to do things I love doing while my dream agent makes his or her way to my email inbox.

Big thanks this week for the pearls of wisdom shared with me by authors Kelli Stanley and Mary Kubica, and the Honorable Susan Breall. It was delightful meeting you ladies at Book Passage, and I look forward to returning with a “how I found representation” story of my own before too long!

September 16, 2017 By Joyce Simons

Why Teachers Make Great Sleuths

I love teachers. If I didn’t have champagne taste, I might have been a teacher myself. Teachers hold a whole lot of information in their heads, and they give it away. When they don’t know an answer to a question, they research the topic because, chances are, they love the challenge of learning something themselves.

It’s said that “Knowledge is power.” It’s a quote attributed to Sir Francis Bacon, though there’s no known evidence of him having actually said or written this maxim. Personally, I prefer the pithier “Knowledge is good,” which was intended as a joke in the film Animal House, because it’s sublime in its simplicity.

Knowledge is Good still from Animal House

But knowledge in and of itself isn’t all that useful unless you put it to work for you.

I’m no expert at what it takes to be a teacher. But I think it’s safe to say that it takes a decent amount of intestinal fortitude to be one in a world where they’re overworked and underpaid, are sometimes expected to substitute-parent their students, and often spend their own money on school supplies when budget cuts get in the way. Something else they give vs. take.

Which adds up to a pretty good start for being an amateur sleuth who isn’t motivated by a big payday. But let’s review some specific criteria for being a modern-day Nancy Drew and see how teachers stack up:

Have a good personality and never think too highly of yourself.
I don’t know about the second part of that sentence, but I wouldn’t want to be sitting in a classroom led by someone with a bad personality. In high school, I had a history teacher with a caustic personality and I can’t recall learning a single thing from him, except how not to treat others. Misanthropes should steer clear of the profession, imho.
Have a backpack or adventure purse to put all of your gadgets in.
I love this criterion! Often teachers have to lug around more than just books and pens. As it happens, the protagonist of THE KNITTING DETECTIVE series carries a “sacoche,” which is the French version of a man-purse. It could easily do double-duty as an “adventure purse.”
Always wear something comfortable.
Check. Grandpa cardigans, elbow patches, shoes with the necessary arch support, et al. In the case of my protagonist, French professor Maxime Martin, even a leather motorcycle jacket qualifies as “comfortable.”
Always have a keen eye.
This is important for so many reasons — catching students cheating on exams, for one. But also knowing when a student is struggling and needs to be engaged in a different way or to a greater extent.
Make friends easily and have a good personality.
See #1.
Never jump to conclusions and always have evidence.
Very important! Did the dog really eat a student’s homework? Highly unlikely, especially if the student doesn’t have a dog.
Always stay calm and be brave.
Well, that goes without saying. If you’re leading an unruly class, it won’t help if you lose your cool and jump into the fray. And that doesn’t even begin to address the amount of courage that teachers in many inner-city schools have to summon up each day.
Always make sure that during a mystery you never give up on a clue.
This goes hand-in-hand with #6. Some clues are easy to dismiss. Have you ever noticed how many sleuths solve crimes only after revisiting clues they initially dismissed?
Make sure everything is in its place, otherwise your evidence will be confusing.
Never mind evidence for a moment. Anyone in authority who comes into contact with children had better have their ducks in a row.
Watch what you say to people: it could make them suspicious of you.
See #9.

So there you have it. I’ve been blessed to study under some great teachers who made me a better storyteller and launched me on a career as a screenwriter first, and then as a novelist. But teachers of all subjects around the world earn my gratitude because where would humankind be without them?

I don’t know if every teacher has a backpack or adventure purse, but if they do, here’s wishing life fills it up with only good things.