Month: September 2024

Research Can Be Dangerous: A Cautionary Tale

By Maggie King

The Confederate statues on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia came tumbling down. For this author, that meant a scene rewrite and a research trip. I didn’t expect the trip to end in the ER.

In my recently released story, Laughing Can Kill You, Hazel Rose investigates the murder of an obnoxious writer given to laughing at others’ expense. In one scene, Hazel and her cousin Lucy attend the victim’s memorial service, hoping to ferret out who killed the man. The service is held in one of the stately homes on Richmond’s Monument Avenue.

Here’s my thumbnail description of the area:

Statues memorializing notable players in the Confederacy punctuated Richmond’s Monument Avenue. The statue paying homage to African-American tennis star Arthur Ashe lent an incongruous note to the lineup of Civil War monuments. Various groups clamored for the removal of the monuments that they considered reminders of slavery and racism; other groups believed removing them was tantamount to erasing history. A grassy mall divided the wide avenue, lined with trees and architecturally-significant houses.

If you’ve kept up with events of recent years, you know that the statues (except for the Arthur Ashe one) were taken down in 2020 and 2021, amid a flurry of protests, acts of vandalism, and government orders. But Laughing Can Kill You is set in 2018, when the statues were still in place. So I was okay? Right?

Maybe not. Would my readers be aware it was 2018? While it was clear to me, it may not be to them. Plus, the statues were still a hot-button topic, regardless of one’s position. I’m not looking to get readers riled, I simply want to give them an enjoyable story.

Monument Avenue was not important to the plot, but I could hardly feature it in a scene without mentioning the famous statues that give it its name. Talk about the proverbial elephant in the room. Street, rather. So I needed a different, but similar, location. It didn’t take long to come up with a Plan B: Richmond’s Northside, just ten minutes from Monument Avenue.

Here’s the description that replaced the Monument Avenue one:

The Hermitage Road Historic District on Richmond’s Northside started life as a streetcar suburb in the late 19th century. Developing the area north of the city to solve the housing problems caused by a rapidly growing city population became possible with the invention of the electric streetcar. The trolley line ran down the middle of Hermitage Road. At some point, a wide, grassy median replaced the line.

As I drove along the historic stretch lined with trees and architecturally significant houses …

It was a beautiful Saturday in May of 2021 when I drove to the Northside to scope out the area for sights, sounds, traffic patterns, etc. to add authentic detail to my story. I had a house in mind, a Colonial Revival I’d visited on a long-ago walking tour of the area. It was similar to the Monument Avenue house and I could use the same interior details.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is colonial-revival-house.png

I walked down Hermitage Road and what did I see in front of the house? A “For Sale” sign!

I started to cross the street, thinking I’d get a better picture of the place from a distance. I hesitate to take pictures of people’s houses, feeling I’m invading their privacy. If challenged, I could say I knew a prospective buyer. Or I could offer a copy of Laughing Can Kill You when it came out. That should certainly appease them.

I looked around at the other houses, at the trees, flowers, taking in the scene, framing photo shots.

No photos were taken. With all my looking around, I didn’t look where I was walking. In an instant, I fell off the curb, landing splat on my shoulder.

When I picked myself up, my arm felt fairly useless. Thinking, hoping, that I’d only suffered a bruise, I decided to go home and ice my arm. But some persistent voice buzzing in my ear said “Go to the ER.” My guardian angel? Where had she been a moment before? Why hadn’t she grabbed me by the hair and pulled me back from that nasty asphalt? Oh well, God and angels work in mysterious ways.

At St. Mary’s Hospital (incidentally, it’s on Monument Avenue), I learned that I had a fractured shoulder. I went home with a spiffy sling that accessorized my wardrobe for six weeks. Luckily, it was my right shoulder and I’m left-handed.

Back to my rudely interrupted research trip. As the Colonial Revival was on the market, there were plenty of pictures of it online. The owners were asking a cool million. I bet you know what I’m going to say next—-that I purchased the place! Um, no, but I did find lots of beautiful interior and exterior pictures.

Shortly before this unfortunate incident, I’d written a scene where Hazel trips over a crack in a sidewalk and uses balance skills she didn’t know she had, avoiding a spill. Hazel is like me in some ways (except I don’t investigate murders) but apparently I’ve given her better balance and coordination skills.

My original plan was to end the research trip with a latte at Crossroads, a fun and funky coffeehouse on Richmond’s Southside. Hazel and Lucy got to enjoy that treat after the memorial service (although I named the place The Beanery in the story). They needed to compare notes on what was becoming an intriguing investigation.

By the end of a summer spent in PT, my shoulder was declared healed.

Laughing Can Kill You was published just after Thanksgiving of 2021.

There you have it: my cautionary tale on the perils of research.

Originally published in Kings River Life Magazine, January 5, 2022

Seven Story Plots

By Jackie Houchin

I recently talked to a young man involved in theatre at his university. He longs to write a play or musical and has all kinds of ideas about special effects, music, and costumes. He has even imagined a few characters. But he has no story. No plot, only a few imaginative scenes.

I told him there are just a few basic plots in the world from which all books and plays originate.  I told him there were five, but on researching them, I found it is seven. (Christopher Booker’s 2004 book The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories.)

Here they are.

  1. Overcoming The Monster.

Christopher Booker suggests Dracula by Bram Stoker, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis (the White Witch), or The Help by Kathryn Stockett.  In the “monster” story, you need a chilling threat (human or not) and a brutal contest that will probably require a significant sacrifice.

  1. Voyage and Return.

The Odyssey in Greek myth and The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien are examples. Your protagonist will need a dangerous journey or impossible quest with an uncertain outcome. He needs opportunities to turn back but to show heroism, he will continue and return with new strength.

  1. Rags to Riches.

Cinderella, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, and Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden are all examples. Your protagonist should grow in character, strength, and understanding, helping them to be empowered. This sometimes involves romance.

  1. The Quest.

The protagonist sets out to find someone or some object, like buried treasure. At each step the stakes need to be raised, making it harder and harder to achieve. The hero emerges stronger or more mature.  J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows are examples.

  1. The Comedy

The idea of Comedy is to create many misunderstandings for the protagonist to get involved in. The plot continues to muddle events, feelings, and perceptions until the end when all will be “miraculously transformed.” The action moves from dark to light. The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse and Bridget Jones’ Diary by Helen Fielding are examples.

  1. The Tragedy

Tragedy is the opposite of Comedy and goes from light to dark. The protagonist has a deep flaw or makes a horrible mistake, causing his undoing and failure. Think of all the “if onlys” that could have happened. Give him ways “out,” which he won’t take, then close off any exit options. Classic examples are Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth by Shakespeare, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy.

  1. The Rebirth

Rebirth is like a tragedy but with a hopeful outcome. The protagonist’s journey has a redemptive arc and sometimes includes romance. The “happy ending” should depend on that arc. Fairy tales are good examples, as are The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, Emma by Jane Austen, and The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.

Of course, you can combine multiple plots and add subplots, too. These seven plots are a guide to building your story.  You can elaborate as your fancy suits you.

Now, give it a go!

Where Fact and Fiction Meet…or Collide

by Gayle Bartos-Pool

Gayle at Bill's House Sept 2022 cropped

There was a saying once upon a time that newspapers were only good to wrap fish or garbage in or perhaps line a bird cage. Now that we have TV News and the Internet, most people don’t even get a newspaper, so the acquiring of news today is a different animal. The quality of that news remains the same: Questionable.

But ripping a story from the headlines in order to write something comes with baggage. The baggage is the “truth” of that story. Is it true? Is it hype? Is it garbage? As for me, I prefer stories that create their own world. Maybe a dollop of flavor from the headlines, but I want my stories to have a life of their own. I want the reader to see something new, not something they are bombarded with on TV, Facebook, Instagram or X.

The old movie The Three Faces of Eve was supposed to be a true story about a gal with multiple personalities. Years later it turned out the patient lied. I wonder what else I read or hear is a lie.

If I take a story from the headlines, I use the “What If?” approach and see what would happen IF that headline was turned inside out and upside down and I created something totally new. I might follow a paved road for a while, but before long I take that detour to something entirely different.

A fellow writer, friend, and someone we lost several years ago, Paul D. Marks, wrote an article on this topic on a website called Criminal Element back on October 19, 2018.  The title of his article was Fiction Is The Lie Through Which We Tell The Truth. The title itself has been attributed to Albert Camus, but if you look it up, people aren’t sure Camus even wrote it. Fact or fiction strikes again.

My comments at the beginning of this blog are more or less what I wrote in response to Paul’s very good article. The pull quote from Paul’s piece was this:

“The best writing makes you think, but it doesn’t tell you what to think. A crime writer can illuminate aspects of society, good and bad, without being preachy or moralistic.” Paul D. Marks

I responded to a comment Paul made on his post by pointing out: “Your White Heat novel did just that, Paul. You took a real time in history, but wrote totally your own story around it. It’s that world I like to read about, not one that’s on TV 24/7. Truth might be stranger than fiction, but fiction, if it’s done right, is far more entertaining. And it doesn’t leave a bad taste in your mouth. It is exactly what you said about Sullivan’s Travels. Sometimes people just want to be entertained.”

After re-reading Paul’s post recently, I wondered had anything changed. After all, that was over five years ago. What has changed? The news on all the available media sources have gotten stranger, more dire, sometimes just plain scary. In fact, some are so odd I have to laugh. Then there are those news stories that change from day to day. Not a different subject, just the “facts” in the first version we heard wasn’t exactly accurate, so they had to retell the story. You could conceivably call the first story a lie, so maybe we can just call it “fiction,” even if it was on a news channel. We all know when something earth-shattering happens the facts aren’t really known right away, and the story has to be verified by several sources until the actual facts are known. We just hope those “facts” are really true.

That’s why I prefer a good book or an old movie. That’s also why I write fiction to tell a story with a point and good characters to entertain the reader, not indoctrinate the reading public with something I saw on the Internet or heard on the news that might turn out to be even stranger fiction than Abbott and Costello Go To Mars. That’s a movie about a couple of guys who accidentally launch a spaceship and think they are heading to Mars, only to land in New Orleans during Mardi Gras. They think they are really on Mars since everybody is in costume. Two bad guys chase them back to the spaceship and they head off again only to land on Venus that’s populated entirely by women who hate men. (That sounds as goofy as news reports today, doesn’t it?) Well, the guys are sent back to earth, but frankly, the 1953 movie isn’t any odder than some reports saying American astronauts didn’t really land on the moon. (Scotty, Beam me up!) Or how about the one about life on earth will end in ten years? They’ve been saying that for fifty years. Can anybody trust the news?

Fiction is more fun, and I can write my own ending. I like my characters better than some of the real people I see on the news, and I can render a fitting end to the bad guys I write into my stories. So what if I live in a fictional world… Wouldn’t it be nice if the real world was like some of the books we read?

And remember, some people are rewriting the actual history we have lived through…Sound familiar? George Orwell wrote that story in his book, 1984 back in 1948. His book was fiction…or was it a blueprint for what lies ahead in today’s world? Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, and Animal Farm have some thought-provoking themes as well. Maybe we should write books that show how we want the world to be in the future…Hope they have a happy ending. At least my books have the main characters fighting for that better world. How about you?

Write On!