Tag: Devil’s Snare

Endings

~ susanoleksiw ~ 3 Comments

Beginnings and endings are the hardest part of writing for me. (That’s today. On other days it’s the muddled middle.) Some writers have arresting, captivating openings that grab the reader and carry her along into a ninety-thousand-word novel. I’m not one of those, but I can eventually get a few words on the page to get the story moving. For me the greater challenge is endings.

Some years ago I listened to Andre Dubus III talk about his new book, House of Sand and Fog, which led him to talk about how he’d grown as a writer. He didn’t like his first book, Bluesman, because he considered it sentimental. His disdain for this failure in craft was obvious, and when I met him at a writers’ event years later, the subject came up again. As I listened to him touch on the challenges in his work, I understood that for him an ending that is sentimental is also in some ways dishonest, an inability to reach deeper for something that was true. I had just purchased TheGarden of Last Days, and read it with that in mind. There is nothing sentimental in that book, least of all in the ending.

Several critics have explored the link between the traditional and cozy mystery and comedy; noir crime fiction has been linked to tragedy. At the end of the cozy mystery, the world is set right again; the villain has been identified and brought to justice of some sort; the lesser crimes of other characters are brought to light and justice is visited on them in various ways, perhaps public censure or shame or remorse; and the minor romance barely acknowledged sometimes comes to light and there is a new beginning for a young couple. All is right with the world. From Restoration Comedy to Agatha Christie and writers today, it is hard for a reader of cozies or traditional mysteries to be satisfied with less. An unrequited love or an unchallenged con artist will annoy some readers as much as a dangling participle will menace the peace of mind of a copy editor. And I understand this. There is something deeply satisfying about the comedic ending, a moment that reassures us that the world aslant can be righted, that our inchoate ideals can be realized.

So how does a writer of traditional crime fiction compose an ending that is both true to the story being told and unsentimental? Sometimes I think this question is just one more obstacle to writing a satisfactory ending, and all I’m doing is complicating matters, making life harder for myself. I’m not unsatisfied with the ending of Family Album, the third in the Mellingham series, but I acknowledge that it is a tad sentimental (maybe more than a tad). But readers loved it because it fulfilled one of the hints at the beginning of the story, and a promise fulfilled, particularly about a possible romance, always brings a frisson of delight. But it was sentimental. At least it wasn’t mawkish.

I don’t remember most of the endings in my books and stories but some stand out, for me at least. The ending of When Krishna Calls in the Anita Ray series required research, rethinking, and stepping back. A woman sentenced to prison looks out on her new world, listening to another prisoner, and is satisfied with the choices she has made. She won’t forget why she is where she is, and she won’t regret it. The ending of Friends and Enemies in the Mellingham series required several versions before I finally landed on the one that worked and fit with the rest of the story. An editor who read the ms and considered acquiring it mentioned how much she liked it (but not enough to take the book). Another ending that satisfied me is that in “Coda for a Love Affair,” in Devil’s Snare: Best New England Crime Stories 2024. The ending is simple, clear as cut glass and sharp.

Endings are hard because the easy ones come fast, are easy to write, and sit well on the page. And that’s the problem. They tempt us to take them, give a sigh of relief, and pat ourselves on the back for coming up with (rather than running carelessly into what looks like) the perfect line or paragraph to close out three hundred pages. Depending on how tired we are of the story and working on it, that ending will appear reasonable, acceptable, or a gift from the writing gods. So this is where I step back and wonder what Andre might think. I don’t have to get far into that mental exercise to admit that the first or even the thirtieth ending is not what I want. 

If nothing else, writing keeps us humble. In our heads we hear perfect dialogue, snatches of prose so brilliant we’ll never need the sun again, but on the page, our pen does not cooperate (or the computer keyboard), and we end up with the mundane, the ordinary, the usual. I keep working on endings but I know I fall short most of the time. As do we all. It’s encouraging to know that greater writers have the same struggles, the same challenges, the same doubts. With one eye on writers whom I admire, I keep at my own work, striving to meet my standards even if that means sometimes disappointing some readers. If I want better endings, I just have to keep at it until I get there.

The Secret

~ susanoleksiw ~ 5 Comments

Many of us in the writing community have a secret, and it’s not exactly the same secret. We write our books, talk about our characters, whom we love, and gnash our teeth over the plot holes, the ever-jiggling middle that refuses to settle down and dash forward, and the ending that leaves us dissatisfied, rewritten three or thirty-three times. You know this because you read us here. None of this is kept secret from anyone who reads a writer’s blog. And then we have to edit the soggy mess, find beta readers, edit it again, and then pop over to our editor, if we have one, or switch hats and become our own publisher.

Somewhere in this scenario is one step that every writer loves. We each have our own. Which one is mine? Those who know me can probably guess.

When I was in college I was the editor of the student humor magazine, which meant handling proofs and working with the printer. I loved working with the printer, seeing those strips of paper with types-set pages on them with little red pencil marks and handing them over to the printer. For some reason I prefer to forget, I always seemed to get him at dinner time. Yes, I love the publishing/printing process. And that brings me to the topic of today—Crime Spell Books.

CSB is the third publishing venture I’ve undertaken with friends or colleagues. What may seem daunting to others has an irresistible pull for me. Two other writers and I began Crime Spell Books after the new editors/owners of Level Best Books, another venture I began with another two friends, dropped the anthology for New England mysteries. They lived in the DC area, so it was understandable. But New England needed its own anthology, so Ang Pompano and Leslie Wheeler and I grabbed the opportunity, and published our first in 2021.

Devil’s Snare: Best New England Crime Stories 2024, now availables is our latest offering, with twenty-four stories, in every sub-genre. We post a call for stories in January, and we read every one that comes in over the next several months (to end of April). We rank the stories 1, 2, or 3 on our own lists, and then we share them to see what we have. It’s always gratifying to see how close we are on most of them. When we decide how many stories we want, we begin discussing the remaining stories that came close, and work for agreement.

Anthologies are among the best works we in the writing community can produce. They show a variety of writers and interests. They require strong collaboration. Each editor loves certain stories and not others, and here we rely on a deep respect for each other’s experience and taste so we can come to agreement. Not every story I love gets into the anthology, and the other two editors probably feel the same. But the result—a list of excellent mysteries and crime stories by known and unknown writers—is something we’re all proud of. And then we come to my special love/hate experience—formatting. I do this because I think there is something wonderful about holding in our hands a finished book that we made, with the chapters and lines of text laid out properly—no unruly paragraphs or rebellious headers or recalcitrant page numbers. Everything is in order and proper and beautiful.

So that’s my favorite part, as much as anyone might question that statement while I’m working on it. The end is worth the frustration, gnashing of teeth, moments of panic, and sheer terror that one wrong punch of a button will send the whole thing to oblivion. And then it’s done. The proof comes in the mail, and then the final copy. And I look up from my desk and there it is. Beautiful. Finished. I can rest of my masses of edited copy and have another cup of tea.

Punctuation

~ susanoleksiw ~ 10 Comments

I’m a fan of punctuation. It’s not something I thought much about in my earlier years, except when a teacher told me I was using commas incorrectly. For my next paper I made sure to use commas as correctly as I could manage. Her response was, “It looks like you sprinkled them like salt.” This did not mar my love of all those black marks on the page also known as letters and punctuation marks, but I did grow skeptical of her instructional skills. 
 
When I arrived in graduate school and stared down at a passage composed in Sanskrit and printed in Devanagari (the script usually associated with that language) at the end of the first semester, I came to appreciate those little marks even more. Not all languages use them, and not even Western languages used them until the medieval period. Until then most paragraphs looked like this.
 
Wordswerewrittenallbunchedtogetherwithnoindicationofwheretoputastoporcommaorquestionmarkthatwouldmakesenseifweallreadwordsthesamewayitwouldntmatterwhatwasmissingbecausetherewouldbenodisagreementwheresomethingendsorbeginswouldbedeterminedtobethesamebyallreadersbutwouldthatbethecaseiftherewerenomarkertoshowwouldweknowhowotherreaderswereinterpretingaparticularpassagecouldbereadinanynumberofways
 
Now consider reading passages like this in a foreign language and a different script. Why am I thinking about all of this?
 
My partners and I have just finished editing and setting the new anthology from Crime Spell Books this year titled Devil’s Snare. One of them remarked that there were a lot of dashes and ellipses in this year’s crop of stories. We agreed that was so. But why?
 
In general most writers understand the correct use of the comma, colon, semicolon, period, quotation marks, question mark, and exclamation point. We know the basic purpose of the dash and the ellipses. I for one blame Emily Dickinson for the overuse of the dash. If she hadn’t been such an inspired poet, that particular mark might have faded into disuse. As it is, it’s at least as popular as the ellipsis. Why do I care?
 
I’m not sure that I do care about these marks. I use them but not nearly as often as many other writers I read. What I do care about is the reading experience. These two marks are so ubiquitous that I finally had to wonder why, and I think I have an answer. 
 
When I read I form a picture of the characters going about their actions in the setting given. I hear them speaking, usually in a manner that conforms to my image of them. If the writer is a good one, my imagination is stimulated and those characters are robust, filling my head. I hear the intonation that tells me Stella is annoyed, hinted by the way the author has described her posture and glance. When the little boy is frightened by the store owner on his first attempt at shoplifting, showing off to his friends, I can hear him stutter, pause, unsure whether he should go on or go quiet or get out as fast as he can. But sometimes my imaginings of the characters’ doings are interrupted by the text. The author wants me to hear an interruption, and ends a sentence with a dash, just so I’ll be sure to notice that the character is interrupted. And if the character should pause to reflect, the author uses an ellipsis to make sure I know the character is pausing, unsure what to say next. But why do this? Doesn’t the writer trust the reader’s imagination?
 
At this point I don’t think the writer is thinking about the reader. I think he or she is thinking about how this scene looks on a stage, in front of a camera. I think he or she has slipped into writing stage directions in the prose text for the actors. The writer is telling the actors how to interpret the scene, and the reader who has imagined something that seems rich and satisfying comes to a series of these doctored lines and the imagination is blunted. It comes to a halt. Clunk.
 
There is a valid use for both marks, but I see it less and less often. When I’m tempted to use one or the other, I take that as a hint from the writing unconscious that I may be getting lazy and it’s time to rework the sentence or the scene. I don’t want to do anything to hinder a reader’s imagination.
 
Perhaps I’m being irked by overuse, so in the interests of fairness I pulled out a copy of The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. The Great Man uses dashes and ellipses, not with abandon, but with care and precision. Hammett was too good a writer to get lazy in the middle of a scene; he could rely on his characters getting across how they felt, what they were doing, and why. I doubt he was thinking about his books being turned into movies, or how a particular actor would interpret a particular scene. (Yes, I know, I could be wrong.)
 
I have finally reached the point where I want to eliminate every ellipsis I encounter, and slip back into my own imagining of the story and its characters. And this may well become my policy as an editor.