Standalone Characters: Making Each Brief Encounter A Night to Remember

I thought I would write something different: a literary short mystery in the third person. I got one paragraph out, a description of the lush North Florida setting of my fictional writers’ workshop. Then the tart voice of a menopausal woman remarked, “At least the little literette could write.” And my protagonist Hester was born. By taking over the story and telling it in her unique first-person voice, she brought it to life. The “little literette” was the trophy-age grad student who’d stolen Hester’s aging husband. What was Hester going to do about it? I don’t outline, and neither does Hester. But Hester was workshopping her novel, The Bigamist’s Wife, and I had five thousand words.

Character and voice are my greatest strengths as a writer. I have two long-running series, one contemporary and one historical. Its protagonists and strong supporting characters have been talking on the page and in my head in the Bruce Kohler Mysteries since 2003 and in the Mendoza Family Saga since 2008. But a character in a standalone short story, as Shakespeare put it, “struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more.” Making standalone characters count is both a challenge and an opportunity that I’ve met in a variety of ways. Some of the results appear in my new collection, Rifts & Reprisals:Collected Stories II.

How Hester deals with her husband’s infidelity with the “little literette” appears in “A Work in Progress,” which originally appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Another betrayed wife finds a very different solution elsewhere in the collection.

Andy is the first-person protagonist of “Who Stole the Afikomen?” The story first appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and was selected by Rob Lopresti as the “best story I read this week” on his blog Little Big Crimes on April 4, 2021. It's also in Rifts & Reprisals. Andy’s the Irish Catholic fiancé of a Jewish lawyer who’s taken him home for Passover to meet her family. Rob thought it was hilarious. He quoted some of my own favorite lines.

Uncle Manny kept saying, "Focus, people, focus. We've got a goal here."
"To get the Jews out of Egypt?" I whispered.
"To get past the rabbis to the gefilte fish," Sharon whispered back.
"Is that the Promised Land?"
"The pot roast is the Promised Land."

My own family was less eccentric than Sharon’s and didn’t have Yiddish accents, but in some respects I based the fictional Seder on memories of ours, of my Irish Catholic husband who was once such a newcomer, and on the anomalies of a mixed marriage. I wrote a serious “Passover” poem about the real-life first Seder in 1978. This time, I wanted to have fun.

“Never Again,” first published in the anthology Me Too Short Stories, had two protagonists: Valerie, a teenager whose father had molested her since the age of four, and Frances, the obese survivor of childhood abuse by the son of her church’s pastor, now married to an abusive alcoholic. Both of these characters’ experiences are not uncommon in real life, as I know very well from my work as a therapist. Sure, to some extent I was going for shock value. But that wasn’t the point. Valerie’s and Frances’s stories carry a powerful message. They are crying out to be heard. I wanted readers to get that and empathize—and cheer when...you can find out in Rifts & Reprisals.

Here's Valerie:
Once, when she was seven, Valerie tried to tell her mom what her dad was doing to her. The sex ed teacher talked about that: "Tell a trusted adult what's going on. You don't have to deal with this alone." Not that they taught sex education to kids that young. It wasn't appropriate, even though it happened to four-year-olds.

And here’s Frances:
She’d had a neighbor once, a thin neighbor, who’d become sort of a friend. Sitting over coffee at Ivy’s kitchen table one morning, she tried to explain what it was like to be invisible. Because she was so fat, no one ever looked at her as if they wanted to do what the preacher’s son had done. But the fat also blotted out Frances. Sad Frances. Mad Frances. Frances who might want to scream or even crack a joke once in a while. Ivy didn’t get it. “But you’re very visible!” she said. “No,” Frances said. “I’m conspicuous.” Ivy moved away soon after that, and Frances never tried again.

“Vice Cop,” first published in Black Cat Mystery Magazine, is the story in Rifts & Reprisals that comes closest to a police procedural. The two protagonists are a vice cop dad and his teenage daughter, who sets out to help by trapping an online predator she’s sure she can outwit. I not only had to make each of them memorable, but I also had to distinguish them from one another within the relatively brief span of 7,000 words and the confines of a complicated plot. To emphasize that the all-important voice was different for each of them, I wrote fifteen-year-old Gracie in the third person present tense, as well as doing my best to have her think like a kid with an irrational belief that she’s invincible. I alternated her POV with that of the first person narrator, juggling the incompatible roles of ace detective who finally has the bad guy in his sights and worried dad in a situation that’s spinning out of control.

There are a couple of flash stories in Rifts & Reprisals and a few more in its companion volume of standalones, Breaches & Betrayals: Collected Stories. I’ve lived with some of my characters for twenty years, as I have with Bruce, Barbara, and Jimmy of the Bruce Kohler Mysteries. I’ve met others only for the space of five hundred words, like the young Sixties woman in “Don’t Think Twice” who is getting sick and tired of all those guys in Cambridge, MA who keep singing that damn Dylan song. Either way, I love them all.

True North Strong and Free: a lighthearted take on a deadly serious issue, because we sure need it.

Like many Canadians, I love our anthem and, since childhood, have proudly belted out our anthem whenever asked and sometimes, even when not asked. Word of advice: the latter is less appreciated in elevators than it should be. 

These lines have always been my favourite:

With glowing hearts we see thee rise,
The True North strong and free.

From far and wide,

O Canada,
we stand on guard for thee.


To paraphrase Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye, the True North part slays me.

For those who haven’t been following (but really, who would that be?) Canada’s sovereignty has become a heated issue and, for reasons not often stated (translation: they want to rob us of our natural resources, from critical minerals to water), Canada's sovereignty is now the punching bag for constant late night rants.

My recent research into the issue of Arctic sovereignty on Ellesmere Island in the early 1900s was a refreshing change from internet scrolling and really made me sigh; that was a gentler time. And a funnier time, at least in retrospect - my apologies to the wonderful Canadians who did the work of standing up for our north so we could all sing about it, even in elevators. I appreciate your noble work and my silly take is not meant to take away from the immense respect you all deserve. 

Let me set the stage: in the early 1900s, people communicated through mail, telegraph, newspapers and a few landline telephones in urban areas. So, how were threats handled when no one was able to type into their phone to reach wide swaths of the population through the internet? If you were sending threats, you could submit them to a newspaper, wait for them to be published and those who read the threats, if throughly inflamed, could rapidly write a letter (by long hand or, for high tech aficionados, with a typewriter) and fire it off into the mailbox to arrive in days or weeks. All this tends to slow down the rage baiting from an incessant drum beat to, at most, a slow tapping or scribbling noise.

How did the 1900 sovereignty threats to Ellesmere Island play out? 

Ellesmere Island is Canada's northernmost island, almost abutting Greenland. There is archeological evidence that Ellesmere island was occupied about 4,000 years ago, and ancestors of the Inuit, the Thule peoples, lived there around the 12^th century. Interestingly, numerous Norse artifacts, including knife blades and a shipwreck have been found. So, this remote island has had its share, albeit small, of inhabitants and attention. 

In the 16^th century, Britain claimed the far north, but in 1880 Britain gave to Canada her title and claims in the Arctic, including Ellesmere Island.

There were even then, concerns about Arctic sovereignty. I'd like to ignore, for the purposes of this article, the many interesting historical details and pare it down to the absurd parts, because these were a lovely respite for me and I hope you will find it a relaxing stroll. 

To counter early American and European threats to its sovereignty in the north, Canada … wait for it… affirmed its title with an 1895 Order-in-Council. That really should have done it, eh? What can be clearer than an Order-in-Council? Surprisingly though, despite this throw down of a hefty gauntlet, in the early 1900s, things got heated.

“American sponsored explorations were apparently in the offing and it was reported that a recently published American atlas showed Ellesmere in the same colour as Alaska—an ominous sign to concerned Canadians.” This is the 1900 equivalent of the inflammatory maps we are now seeing posted online but, rather than using AI, a mapmaker was summoned, swiftly drew a map that was instantly submitted to an atlas that was sent to the printers post-haste and promptly printed and mailed out. I suspect the process was completed within the short span of months. Or years. Canadians were upset, naturally, and their retaliation was swift (or swiftish, because, the 1900s). The Department of the Interior formed a small group of senior civil servants into the Advisory Technical Board in 1919.

Take that you brutes.

The threats to our north did not stop there and swiftly, (again, swiftish) by 1920, the Danes , who viewed Ellesmere Island as a no man’s land, began hunting on the island. Canada took this threat to its sovereignty seriously and retaliated by forming a committee.

That will teach you.

It’s obvious that Canada doesn’t play around with our True North, has dealt with all threats fiercely and the threats actually went away, until now, when we find ourselves in 2026, with a foghorn blasting in our ear.

Should we retaliate, early 1900 style, with a committee or, given the constant threats and insults, a committee and an Advisory Board and, if needed, the dreaded Order-in-Council? 

Should we send letters ASAP (typewritten for speed) to newspapers, and insist they take a telegraph poll of Canadians to assess the support for these rather drastic actions?

If only these would work, but a Canadian can dream...

The Louvre Heist, One Year Later

SUNDAY MORNING, 19 OCTOBER 2025: 

Two masked men parked a truck-mounted furniture lift along Quai François Mitterrand, cut through a Louvre window, and climbed into the Galerie d'Apollon. Less than eight minutes later, the crew was speeding across Paris with an estimated €88 million in crown jewels. Almost a year later, it's becoming clearer that the crew wasn't necessarily all skilled professionals. But the French response wasn't bumbling, either. Arrests began within a week. 

THE RECAP

Inside the Galerie, the two-man crew was methodical--careful, sort of. They stayed near their window exit and cut into display cases within easy reach. Some accounts speculate their movements were rehearsed, and surely that can't be dismissed. They'd have known their time window and tools available and slow-grind escape route. 

The guys also seemed clueless about the collection's true value. In that sense, they bagged an amazing haul: three pieces from the sapphire set of Queen Marie-Amalie and Queen Hortense, three emerald-laden pieces from Empress Marie Louise's set, and two pieces belonging to Empress Eugénie. They also tried bagging Eugénie's crown. It was essentially crushed during the theft. 

Valuable, absolutely. But other pieces in the Galerie's collection are more famous--and reportedly more valuable. Maybe the guys were behind schedule, or maybe they just didn't know.

THE RESPONSE

You might call it flat-footed. Louvre security spotted the truck lift outside, but this was the Louvre. There are always contractors around. Worse, the Galerie's security cameras pointed away from the window, and the security systems were badly outdated, a problem noted in a 2014 audit. Only after evacuating the crowd and inspecting the Galerie did they confirm that a theft had gone down.

Things went better quickly. The Police Secours arrived within minutes. Seriously, the Prefecture was only a half-kilometer away. The big guns, the Brigade de Répression du Banditisme (BRB), arrived soon after. Detectives collected a treasure trove of evidence: Eugénie's broken crown, discarded gear and clothing, shoe impressions indicating the crew's size, and even the stolen truck lift the thieves had tried — and failed — to torch. 

In short order, French prosecutors assembled a swarm of investigators, forensic scientists, art theft experts, cyber cops, and anyone else a furious government could muster. Traffic camera footage showed the crew taking the A6 south, and hours of social media videos captured the crime from start to finish. 

By June 2026, the French had reportedly charged five alleged members of the crew.

THE INSIDE MEN

Well, there was a lot of DNA recovered, and the police quickly matched some of it in the law enforcement databases. The people linked to those matches allegedly lived in the same north Paris arrondissement. And two of the matches maybe pointed toward the inside guys.

One early arrest was a guy with a minor record. News reports said that DNA evidence linked him to cutting tools recovered from the Galerie. According to those reports, the guy claimed to have been recruited only days before the heist and told that they would hit a jewelry store. In his statement, he said that he'd never have signed on if he'd known the target was the Louvre. His reported cut was €20,000.

Another early arrest was the alleged other inside man, an unlicensed taxi driver believed to be the smash-and-grab guy. That had been his literal instruction, the guy said according to French media, to smash and grab what he could. Investigators reportedly found his DNA on the display cases and the discarded equipment. His alleged cut was as little as €15,000.

After speeding off, the crew blended in with Paris traffic and circled a northerly route to Aubervilliers. Investigators retraced the drop route thanks to traffic and private cameras, witness accounts, and phone metadata. The guys, it seemed, held onto their burner phones. Both guys arrested reportedly mentioned the same lead contact, who berated them for not smashing and grabbing more. 

THE LIFT GUYS

The two guys working and watching the truck lift weren't hard to track down, apparently. Reports say that the lift had been their one job--and it remained outside the Louvre, allegedly along with their DNA on the lift and gear. Oui, said the lift rental company, these were the same guys who jacked their truck off the lot days earlier. 

According to news reports, the lift crew had done their work in their own silo. They were only connected with the inside guys in the hours before the job. 

FIELD SUPPORT

Another cell reportedly handled communications and logistics. Supply teams garnered scooters, and scouts buzzed around the Louvre, scouting the area and relaying go signals from burner phones. Reportedly, this cell didn't know anyone else involved in the job, sometimes even their fellow scouts. 

The French rounded up several potential suspects based on their past connections and cell phone signals during the heist and possible DNA found on recovered scooters. Three of these arrested have been charged as conspirators.

THE MASTERMIND

The inside guys seemed to know what to do and did it, mostly. The lift guys lifted, and the scouts scouted. Mistakes or not, conflicting statements or not, this was an operation. Coordinated.

The suspects awaiting trial all mention such a ringleader, if neither named nor described, but it follows that a mastermind intent on controlling risk and communications would likely use intermediaries for recruitment and training. Just as plausibly, a serious organization combined expertise and a network of neighborhood relationships. 

THE RECRIMINATIONS

No one does outrage like the French, and this wounded the national pride. The thieves had needed only glass cutters and a furniture lift, pour le Dieu. At the Louvre. 

Public and media criticism was withering. French ministries harrumphed over the fiasco and no doubt thanked the stars that the core failures weren't theirs. Even the truck lift manufacturer got in on the action, with an ad touting the lift's reliability.

The Louvre director, Laurence des Cars, reportedly offered her resignation in the immediate aftermath. The Minister of Culture refused it. Instead, des Cars was kept on while the investigation and security reviews swirled, which was important leadership continuity--and perhaps also a fate worse than termination. Critics insinuated that des Cars pursued other priorities instead of aggressively closing known security gaps. 

By June 2026, des Cars had moved on. "A planned transition," the Ministry of Culture said.

THE FUTURE

The Galerie remained closed off and locked down for weeks. After the forensics team left, the Louvre installed a sweep of high-tech devices in the Galerie and throughout the museum. Other reported enhancements tightened the contractor loophole and improved coordination with the police. Today, the Louvre is a harder target. But more upgrades will go on for years.

And for even longer, much about this heist will remain a mystery. The mastermind may never be found. Jewels--even crown jewels--can be stashed indefinitely, or dismantled, or cut into untraceable pieces. 

One thing is abundantly clear: The heist, like the Louvre itself, has found its place in history.

I Remember Everything—and Nothing

 

Erie Lackawanna tower, Hoboken.

I can’t believe it’s been 25 years. I can remember how it felt, sure, but at this remove I need a historic timeline to assemble the pieces correctly. So I have used that to help me remember.

I worked from home in those days, freelancing for a string of magazines. I don’t remember my morning routine, but I know that my browser home page was set to the front page of The New York Times.

That morning, when I woke my desktop, above the NYT headline was a tiny sentence in red or black announcing the breaking news: a plane had hit one of the towers of the World Trade Center. The plane had struck at 8:46 AM.

I immediately assumed the aircraft was something small, like a Piper Cub. I imagined a young, inexperienced pilot making the most egregious of errors. But I couldn’t confirm that because one sentence was all the newspaper knew at that point.

I wasted time poking around other sites, hoping to glean more than that single sentence. I came up empty at the Associated Press and a few other news sites before I turned on the television. I did so just in time to watch the second jet hit the second tower. That happened at 9:03 AM.

By then, everyone knew what was going on.

I don’t know when I called Suzanne. She was an old college friend who had recently moved to Hoboken, our little river town across the Hudson River from Manhattan. She was the only other freelance journalist I knew in town.

I don’t remember when she came over my place. Before, or after 9:37 AM, when the third jet crashed into the Pentagon? I know we were in my apartment watching TV, worrying about friends we knew who worked in the vicinity of the towers, when one of the broadcasters announced that the south tower had fallen.

Such a thing seemed unfathomable.

I had grown up watching those towers being built. For what seemed like forever, my family had passed the construction site every time my father drove us to Brooklyn to visit our grandmother. As an adult I’d spent a long winter night at the rooftop restaurant, Windows on the World, during a lavish Christmas party thrown by my then-employers at the children’s publishing house, Scholastic, a firm enriched by franchises such as Harry Potter, Goosebumps, and The Babysitters Club. Hell, I had been in one of those towers as recently as last Friday, taking the escalator down to the PATH station for my ride home after meeting with some editors.

But now, watching that morning, Suzanne and I could not believe that a building could be toppled so quickly. Were they absolutely sure? After all, there was all that smoke…

Only one way to find out.

I lived in an old five-story tenement building several blocks west of the river. We stepped out the back doors of my apartment, and scampered up to the roof.

It was was a Tuesday. A beautiful clear day. I do recall that.

I saw the river. I saw the smoke. I heard sirens emanating from the city below me.

But for the life of me, I cannot remember the color of the smoke. Black? Gray? White? Today I need the photos as badly as the timelines to fix those images securely in my mind.

While we were on the roof, the north tower collapsed. And yes, even with the smoke, it was obvious. There one second, gone the next.

Only minutes ago on TV, we had heard the voices of family members telling the on-air broadcasters just where in those towers they believed their loved ones were trapped. In elevators. On stairwells. On the roofs.

Had those people gotten out?

Suzanne and I hugged briefly, then went back to scanning the scene across the river.

Then, honestly, I don’t remember the next few hours.

I know that phone and mobile phone service were disrupted regionally. When I couldn’t connect with my parents, who lived about 20 miles north of me, I made the foolish decision to drive home to check on them. Foolish, because the traffic was insane, and my drive took forever.

They were fine, but of course they were. I spent a few nights sleeping in my old bedroom. I heard that my young cousin—who had a heart condition and worked in the Wall Street area—had joined the long line of dust-spackled commuters who trudged back to their homes over the Brooklyn Bridge. Her husband, then a school teacher at one of the public schools, had done the same.

By Friday, a group of us Scholastic alums carpooled to south Jersey to attend the wake of the brother of one of our colleagues. The drive down, on the New Jersey Turnpike and the Garden State Parkway, to a funeral home at the Jersey Shore, is associated in my memory with the sight and sounds of vehicles flying American flags and honking in soldarity to each other.

On the car radio, actor Henry Winkler was telling a DJ that going forward, our mourning nation would have to learn to take better care of each other and better care of ourselves. Why he stressed those words, I don’t know.

I don’t remember much of the wake. In, hugs, out, then dinner somewhere before the somber ride back north. Our colleague’s family were lucky only in the sense that their loved one had escaped to the presumed safety of one of the tower roofs. When that building pancaked on itself, his remains were among the first to be discovered and identified. Or so we were told. And thus one family was permitted the closure denied to so many others.

One of my other cousins, who then worked as a U.S. attorney, requested, nay, demanded, my presence over the weekend. Over the years, she had gotten chummy with the firefighters who worked at the firehouse near her office in downtown Brooklyn. They had invited her to a wake and pot luck gathering in honor of their fallen members.

“You gotta come with me,” she said. “It’s going to be too painful.”

Did she bring food for the pot luck? Did I? She was (and still is) the type who can be counted on to make a giant crockpot of meatballs, but I just don’t remember.

I do remember us standing outside that firehouse, pouring ourselves plastic cups of beer from kegs literally positioned on the sidewalk.

I remember how congenial the firefighters were. How dry-eyed they were as they told us of the friends they had lost.

One man stands out in my memory for his wordplay. He talked about how, once they were allowed to search the rubble for bodies, they found so few.

“You know why?” he said “They were gone. Poof.”

Then he launched into a litany of words which all rhymed, and which all have roughly the same meaning: Decimated! Obliterated! Annihilated!

Over the years, I have tried to recall many of the other things people said and did doing those first few days, and I take myself to task for not taking the time to write much of it down.

You were a reporter, I tell myself. You should have known to capture what you were witnessing. Where was your pen? Where was your notebook?

I do remember walking to the water’s edge in Hoboken over the next week to watch smoke rising from Ground Zero. I remember the flowers and photos and tokens people left by the railing on the southernmost corner of that riverside park. And in the weeks that followed, I remember seeing posters of missing people fluttering on every surface throughout the city. Families holding out hope that their loved ones made it out alive.

At the time, I was researching a medical story for a science magazine about a family of physicians located in Massachusetts. On one of those phone interviews, the eldest sibling told me how Mass General in Boston had leapt into action, preparing their emergency room to receive potentially hundreds of patients who might be airlifted from New York City to Boston for care.

“But no one came,” he said. “They didn’t need us.”

Eventually, yes, I did write a short story based in part on what I saw that day and what came after. It’s the story of a former tough guy from Hoboken who has escaped his previous life until 9/11 forces him back into the fold.

“Back to the Boke” was written about ten years after the fact. By then, I was married and had left Hoboken for good. I based the piece mostly on the old-timers I remembered populating the city. Guys who played endless rounds of cards at the social club across the street from my apartment building. The guy on our block who earned money hauling scrap metal in his rusted-out pickup. The Italian American grocers, butchers (aka “meat-cutters”), bakers, and cheesesteak vendors who lamented the loss of families in a town made famous by Sinatra and Brando, and who ceaselessly excoriated the inevitable ascendance of Wall Street yuppies.

The story found a home at Beat to a Pulp, which kept it available until the site closed. It holds the distinction of being my first “long” story to be published at a mystery venue.

I still beat myself to a pulp wishing I had kept a better record of those days. A solid paper trail in my own hand would be far more valuable to me now than my recollections.

Once, at a book festival, I met an author who wrote a couple of books on the fragility of human memory. How what we think happened often turns out to be untrue when meticulously fact-checked. I recall being so impressed by the reporting in The New Yorker after Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans. Those writers had fanned out into the city looking for stories, they had carefully recorded them, and then they had rushed back to file their pieces. Maybe I would have done better if I myself had been on deadline. Who knows.

But hey—if there’s any lesson to be learned after 25 years, it’s to keep a notebook and pen handy, to know when to use them, when to tuck them away, and when to look, listen, and feel instead.

Hoboken days:
Visiting Sinatra’s birthplace.

* * *

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

joedenise.com

[REPOST] When Character Development Meets "The Real World"

Flat characters are two-dimensional in that they are relatively uncomplicated and do not change throughout the course of a work. By contrast, round characters are complex and undergo development, sometimes sufficiently to surprise the reader.

Stock character, a character in a drama or fiction that represents a type and that is recognizable as belonging to a certain genre. Most of the characters in the commedia dell'arte, such as Columbine and Harlequin, are stock characters.

– Both quotations courtesy of The Encyclopedia Britannica

I have written at length in this space about the importance of character development in your writing. (If you're interested in reading some of my previous work on character, feel free to click here, here, here, and here.) And lately, I've returned to the well, and begun to consider the importance of the delicate balance of character development versus character continuity.

Take John Updike's Rabbit series of four novels, all featuring the same central character, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. The series takes place over a span of thirty years, taking Rabbit from his mid-twenties to his death in retirement. Updike released the various novels an average of ten years apart (1960, 1971, 1981 and 1990). The final two novels (Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest) won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Over the course of the series Updike kept his character restless and angsty, while also showing both physical and mental changes in the character as he grew older. He did this against an evolving social backdrop (the early '60s, '70s, '80s and '90s, respectively) that dovetailed pretty seamlessly with the character's arc (see my post on the effective use of setting as another character in your work). And, obviously, "Rabbit" Angstrom would be an example of the "round character" defined above. Taken as a whole, the books are well worth your time.

Where Updike's series presents a collective masterwork of balancing development and continuity, it has in many ways presented an outlier bucking the last few decades of writing marketplace trends. This seems especially true in crime fiction.

Don't get me wrong. There are lots of great writers currently out there developing their characters, working their collective tails off, and producing really unforgettable stuff.

However.

The last few decades have seen the rise of the so-called "airport thriller." And where early practitioners of the art of thriller writing (then, as now, a sub-genre of crime fiction), such as Robert Ludlum and the immortal Elmore Leonard were masters equal to Updike in writing characters who showed growth, they have proven the exception rather than the rule. The emphasis in thrillers is on fast-paced plotting, and with the market growing more and more lucrative, publishers have shown a preference for thrillers as part of a series of books, rather than the stand-alones most favored by so many masters of the sub-genre.

I'm not giving examples because I'm not looking to call anyone out. Plus, were my agent to tell me tomorrow that a top five publisher was offering me a multi-book contract adorned with a whole lot of zeroes to write thrillers that adhered to these standards, I would not hesitate to dive into this end of the writing pool. Character development tends not to be a hallmark of thriller writing. It's delightful to see when you find it, but truth be told, thriller fans (my brother among them) tend to read thrillers for the action, first and foremost.

What I'm saying is that I have begun to see this "light" character development crop up more and more in other types of crime fiction, especially in any number of series. The character has a benchmark, and even in a series that runs for years, tends to vary little from said benchmark. In so doing, series lead characters which ought to be "round" tend to take on the aspects of so-called "stock characters."

Rather than give examples of this, let me go in the opposite direction, using a real world example.

There's this guy I used to know. We grew up on the same block. Neighbors and friends for years and years. We eventually lost touch (as people often do), and a few years ago, I happened across his social media presence. Here's a thumbnail of the "character" I found there:

My old friend worked in radio, eventually helming his own talk radio show. From here he took a quick detour into StartUpLand at one of the pioneer startups where he made a pile, then eventually found his way back into talk radio. Now in his fifties, his political and social positions seem to rely heavily on the foundation of his deep spiritual faith, and the importance of his family in his life.

And I say good for him. He was a great guy back then, and I have little doubt he still is.

What makes this thumbnail so interesting is the set of fundamental differences I see between the guy I knew back in early-to-mid '80s and his current self. When we were teenagers growing up together, my old friend was practically a socialist. And for all intents and purposes heavily agnostic (not irreligious so much as indifferent to religion). Something that hasn't changed at all is that he was a brilliant, and opinionated conversationalist then, as he still seems to be. One huge difference was that he loathed Ronald Reagan more than I did (I still do. If anything I loathe Reagan more in retrospect). Not sure what's changed there, but needless to say, my friend isn't exactly "anti-Reagan" (or anti-his memory, I guess) these days.

Some other things: he went on a family vacation with myself and my extended family, and developed his first real crush on a girl who came on the trip with one of my cousins. It was amusing to watch this most opinionated of guys basically abandon several of his previous opinions based on what his new love interest thought. 

And yet I never saw him in love again during the time I knew him. If anything I saw him protecting his heart, flirting with girls, never dating, plenty of "hanging out," but never making himself "available."

Here's the funniest part, though. I had another friend back in my teens. Conservative, grew up with a strong church background, also opinionated. Loved Reagan.

I've stayed in touch with this friend. He's got grown kids, a thriving career in a union construction job, climbs mountains and he frequently uses his free time helping build schools in Sub-Saharan Africa. I have no idea how feels about politics these days. We don't talk politics when we talk. We talk music. And it's always great.

That funny thing? My first friend back in the day heartily disliked this second friend. And nowadays my second friend reminds me of my first friend in his youth and that first friend reminds me much more of my second friend in his youth.

Heyyyyy I think I might have the germ of a story idea here....

See you in two weeks!

The Tell-Tale Heart

We went down to Albuquerque last week for an Edgar Allan Poe theatrical, which was entertaining in itself, and got you thinking about Poe beyond the confines and conventions of theater.  It was billed as a “speakeasy,” and they did indeed serve themed drinks in the intervals.  Carole had seen a previous production, up in Farmington, and loved it, the event put on in different venues by different casts.

You open on a set that could be a garret, or a study, and Poe enters to introduce himself, and talk a little about his work, his themes and obsessions - death of course a big one – and then slips into the shadows as another actor comes on to dramatize the story, first up, “The Fall of the House of Usher.”  Curiously, they were musical interludes, sung-spoken, so it helped if you were already familiar with the plotlines, because they were really riffs or attitudes toward the stories, not staged readings.  “Usher” was efficiently creepy, followed by “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Premature Burial,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Gold Bug,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” the two of the more famous poems, “Annabelle Lee” and “The Raven.”  So it was a highlight reel, with drink breaks.  I liked the actor who played Poe a lot, but I thought the rest of the cast was less successful.  Mostly, I think, because of the material they were given.  The trouble with condensing Poe, or any writer, isn’t just that you lose the words themselves, but the sense of the words - the rhythm, and the pace.  Poe creates dread through a very calculated use of echoes and repetition, foreshadowing and false narratives.  What he’s struggling to write, in effect, is psychological horror.  Even though that term, or even the concept, didn’t exist at the time.

David Morrell has suggested that Thomas De Quincey, in his series of essays, On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, is actually engaging in psychological analysis – Morrell has now written three period thrillers about it - although that concept was unknown to the Victorians.  Freud and the Vienna school were sixty years away.  Poe is, for one thing, influenced by De Quincey, but it seems pretty clear to a modern reader that Poe is trying to describe a phenomenon he doesn’t have the vocabulary for.  Roderick Usher is deeply weird and wicked, his sexual mania left to the reader’s imagination, but the house cracking at its foundations and collapsing into the dark lake is vivid and literal.  Sure, it’s metaphorical, but it’s illustrative of psychological collapse.  Roderick is coming apart at the seams, because he can’t stand the idea that his dying sister’s body might be stolen, to be dissected by medical students in an anatomy class, so he buries her alive to prevent it.  The whole thing reeks of what was diagnosed in the 19^th century as hysteria, a peculiarly female malady.

Poe is readily characterized as Gothic, and I think there’s more going on here than that.  Not that there has to be more, for Poe to be taken seriously, but that he’s actually even odder than we imagined.  My main takeaway from our recent evening with Poe, down in Albuquerque, is that it’s past time I revisited his writing.  His influence is widely recognized, and he certainly deserves to be read.

Verbal Cues

 

I’m currently editing a story that needs some help. The tale lacks energy. It could use a verbal kick in the pants.

Cullen 328 Creative Commons

I culled out some of the crutch words—just, really, a lot, very, slightly—I’ve got a slew of them. They fill up the story without doing anything to advance it. They sneakily leaked in while I composed. When I pulled them out, the story became more efficient. The reader arrived at the point more quickly. But the piece still lacked vibrancy.

I blame the verbs. I’ve got some bland ones tucked into the tale. And I compensated by jacking up the adverbs. “But it’s not my fault,” he said defensively. “I think it’s in my biology,” he added genetically.

Stephen King, in his craft memoir, On Writing, should have taught me this. He reminds me of the elementary lesson that verbs come in two types—active and passive. With an active verb, the subject is doing something. With a passive verb, the subject is just letting it happen. Even when my subject is active, she sometimes moves into a room instead of gliding or stomping. Stronger verbs, like specific nouns, help the readers form a better picture.

As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, I’m not sure the blandness is entirely my fault. As a species, I believe that we have more trouble with verbs. Humans want to name things. We like to slap labels on stuff we see. If we name it, we’re on our way to understanding it. We give ourselves control. Linguist Jess Zafarris says that English has three times as many nouns as verbs. We’re skilled at naming things.

Down the road, Zafarris says, we back-form and create verbs from the pre-existing nouns. “Evaluation,” and “regurgitation,” for instance, both existed long before the verbs “evaluate,” or “regurgitate” came into existence. Our English verbs are always playing catch up.

William Shakespeare gets credit for inventing a host of new English words. Many of those were verbs that emerged from pre-existing nouns. Among the back-formed verbs he created are “negotiate” from “negotiation,” and “metamorphose” from “metamorphosis.”

We’re hardwired for the naming of things. The more analytical process of describing action, however, proves harder for humans. Motion is less tangible. Across languages, processing verbs in sentences is more neurologically demanding than processing nouns. From an evolutionary biology standpoint, our species wants to preserve that brain power. We may need those little gray cells suddenly to scheme our way out of becoming prey. Self-preserving authors, like me, tend to rely on forms of “to be,” and other simple, unimaginative verbs. Then when we need a little zest, we succumb to the temptation of adding adverbs.

That’s my story for the rough draft. I’m blaming Darwin and evolutionary biology.

Having identified the problem, the solution emerges—edit. I’ll live with getting the wrong words down initially. I can’t edit a blank screen, to paraphrase Jodi Picoult. Once something tumbles onto the page, I’ll test the verbs, asking if this is the best choice for the situation being described. Would it reinforce character if he “lumbered” rather than merely “walked”? Almost certainly.

The “be” verbs are easy fixes. They can reliably be traded for more interesting options.

“The body was in the den” becomes “The body lay in the den.” At least with “lay,” I’m describing the body doing something, as much as a dead body can reasonably be expected to do. Perhaps it morphs into “Sluggo carried the body into the den.” The focus gets changed off the body and onto the actor.

I’ll work through the short story and send it off. Someday, I hope, readers will see it. I don’t know where or when. All I know is that the version that eventually surfaces won’t look anything like the version I’m working through now. The nouns you might recognize, but the verbs will look very different.

I'll be traveling when this posts, on the hunt for good nouns and better verbs. 

Until next time.