books site! If this is your first time visiting, here is a brief sitemap:

• About the site
• How it works: a brief description of how the site is structured and how to get around.
• Related thoughts: related posts on my blog.
• Categories: I write on several different topics. Links to all of them can be found in the “Categories” section of the sidebar. Hint: mousing over the category will bring up a description in the tooltip.

Jennifer Crusie is my guilty pleasure: by her own account, she’s a romance author, but I like to use the “chick lit” euphemism (George Carlin would have a field day with me). She’s a brilliant writer with a great feel for character and dialogue (see my post on dialogue for an example), and a dry, snarky writing style. Right up my alley.

While I love almost all of her books, I have a feeling I’ll like her future ones even better. Why? Well, recently she did something really interesting. She teamed up with action-adventure author Bob Mayer and wrote a book; the only rules were that she’d have final say on the heroine’s POV, and he’d have the same on the hero’s POV. They call it Romantic Adventure. The result? Don’t Look Down, due in stores April 4, 2006. Now, Mayer has the same kind of dry, snarky writing style that Crusie does, so I’m quite looking forward to the book, especially since action-adventure is one of my favorite types of genre-fiction.

Some Crusie links:

• Her website
• Her blog: this was a godsend to me, since she’s not a very prolific author (she writes a book about once every two years), and I was going crazy waiting for her to write more. She is very very funny, so make sure to read some of her older posts, too. Here’s one particularly great one.
• My favorite Crusie novel: Faking It
• And my second favorite one: Bet Me
• The Amazon page for Don’t Look Down
• The Crusie-Mayer website: make sure to read How It Happened and the first chapter of Don’t Look Down.
• Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer’s dueling blog project of 2006 (now over), He Wrote, She Wrote. Fascinating and funny.
• Crusie & Mayer’s dueling blog project of 2007: online writing workshop. I love this love this love this. Normally you’d have to pay a lot of money to get technical instruction from bestselling authors. Full of just the sort of technical arcana any aspiring writer is looking for; simply awesome.

You’ve heard me say it before: Charlie Huston is my hero. No, really. He is everything I’d like to be as a writer, and an absolute pleasure to read—in a heart-pounding, throat-clutching kind of way. His books have it all: tight plotting, wonderful characterization, rapid-fire dialogue, heart-attack-inducing tension.

If you haven’t read his books, I don’t know what you’re doing wasting your time here. Go get copies of all of them and get cracking. I promise you won’t regret it.

Huston’s website, Pulp Noir^*, can be found here. He’s got that whole typewriter/bullethole/blood spatter aesthetic going on over there, which, don’t get me wrong, is cool, but the tiny font and the nonexistent left and right margins, plus the text stretching across the entire page, and not being spaced enough, make the site very difficult to read^**. Which is a shame, because it’s got some great information on it, like his blog entries. In my book (ha, no pun intended), the more I get to read of his writing, the better.

You’ve also heard me say that I was pretty depressed after finishing Six Bad Things today, because I’d finished all his books that are out, and now I have to wait however many months or years it takes for another of his books to get published. The good news, according to this, is that A Dangerous Man, the third book in Huston’s Hank Thompson trilogy, is set to be released sometime this year. So the wait is not as long as I thought. バンザイ！

^* Huston’s disclaimer:

NEW YORK — I write pulp. I write noir. Open one of my books and you’ll see I’m not lying. I write about people killing each other and suffering or not suffering the consequences. I write about the halt and the lame and the addicted. So it should come as no surprise that this site is for fucking grownups.

Sex, drugs, rock-n-roll, violence, politics, sports, and other adult themed topics may be discussed here in graphic detail. And if you know anything about my writing, you know I’m incapable of expressing myself without cursing. If you don’t care for it, go fucking Yahoo.

Charlie.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

^** Wait. Hold everything. Apparently the site only looks bad in Safari. In Firefox, there are margins, proper line spacing, tabs, everything. Plus the sidebar is up on the side of the page instead of at the bottom, like it should be. I am so going to write the web designer and tell him/her that the site is completely broken in Safari.

Update 02/21/2006 10:23: Yay! The site is fixed in Safari now. Happy browsing!

Charlie Huston’s Six Bad Things – 5 stars.

I love this book. I love this book. I love this book. Charlie Huston is my hero; when I grow up, I want to write like him.

But now I am sad, because I have just finished his last in-print book, and I will be Huston-less for the next however many months or years it takes him to publish another one.

so I designed a new one this morning. Cleaner and more pleasant to look at, I think. Let me know your thoughts.

Since this is the first of my Don’ts series, I’ll do a little explaining. As I’ve said before, while I am not formally trained (much) as a writer, I am a shameless elitist. And in the past few years of reading, I started unconsciously quantifying what I liked and didn’t like about books I read, and why I liked or didn’t like it. With my recent enrollment in a writing class, and my subsequent attempts to write fiction of my own, as well as my reading of other amateur fiction, I’ve come up with an unofficial list of things not to do when writing. I’ll be writing posts on a number of different elements of writing; this post will be on dialogue and how not to do it well.

• Exclamation points: This one is simple; don’t use too many of them. People don’t tend to exclaim too much except in high drama moments. Dialogue with too many exclamation points just seems overwrought, and, well, like the author is trying too hard.

  There are, of course, some exceptions to this rule, but they are mostly in comedic writing, and then only when the author is particularly skilled.

• Synonyms for “said”: I’m talking about words like “screamed”, “exclaimed”, “whispered”, “commented” (especially “commented”), “cried”, “laughed”, and the like. Don’t use too many of them. In fact, try and minimize the use of these altogether. “Said” pretty much says it all. Use of other words, I find, tends to overwhelm the dialogue and not let it, ahem, speak for itself.
• Adverbs: Things like “she said quietly”, “he whispered brokenly”, etc. Again, they tend to be melodramatic and overwhelm the dialogue. The dialogue should communicate the mood all by itself, with little or no help from outside description like this.
• Exposition: This should, in most cases, not be allowed. It is, sure, necessary sometimes, but (a) not as often as you’d think, and (b) very rarely done well. The rule? Never explain in dialogue what both the speaker and the listener already know (nor, indeed, what the speaker wouldn’t include in the conversation because it would be inconsequential). If it’s crucial to the reader for the clarity of your story, do it outside dialogue, in the narrative, where it belongs.
• Realism: This is perhaps the hardest part of dialogue to get right, and yet the most crucial. It ties in quite closely to characterization; make your characters talk like real people. Don’t make them say things they wouldn’t normally say*. Dialogue that is poorly tied to the character, that is not consistent, can be the quickest destroyer of the reader’s trust—and by extension, interest—in the work.
• Pacing: This has to do with the rhythm of your characters’ speech. Don’t make it too fast; your character is not likely to spout huge sentences with no pauses in the middle. But also don’t make it too slow; this just drags the conversation out and risks boring the reader.

I think that’s all I’ve got. As I said, this is largely from my own figuring and experience, and perhaps is not the conventional wisdom.

* See my post on dialogue in The Criteria, the bad and mediocre dialogue examples.

All right, peeps, here’s the first draft of my story. As before, not much editing has been done, so please be forgiving. As you’re reading, please keep the following questions in mind:

• Does any part of it look or sound unnatural to you? Speech, action, whatever?
• Are the characters sufficiently developed? Do they feel “fuzzy” to you?
• Does it make sense? Is there a cohesive narrative, and did you feel you understood what was happening throughout the story?
• Is it predictable? I know this isn’t the most original plot out there, but is it too trite? Did you feel you knew what was going to happen the whole time?
• I have taken some care to add description of the main character’s behavior into the story, in an attempt to make you as the reader feel more a part of him; in his skin, so to speak. Is it too much? Am I drowning the story in banality? Are there too many unnecessary details?
• And finally, did it pass the entertainment test? Were you interested to find out what happened? Did you get bored at any point in the story? Was the pacing too fast? Too slow? Did you, in fact, like it?

When you’re done, if you’re so inclined, please do shoot me an e-mail with your impressions. I’d greatly appreciate it.

So without further ado: A Little Knowledge.