Author of the novel, Most Wanted (February 2005)
As a federal prosecutor in New York City, I spent most of a decade
locking up hardened criminals. Specializing in narcotics and gangs
cases, I knew crime inside out. By the time I left that job, I'd done
so many drug trials, listened in on so many wiretaps, and debriefed so
many cold-blooded killers and thugs about so many different types of
crimes that I could have gone out and committed one myself. And gotten
away with it. So it seemed like an obvious evolution to start writing
suspense novels based on my gritty real-life experiences. I figured
crafting a page-turner out of that material had to be a piece of cake, right?
Far from it. There's a lot more to writing good suspense than knowing
the ins and outs of the drug and murder biz. Here I was in possession
of the world's best raw material, but when I sat down to write fiction,
I was staring at a blank screen just like anybody else. I wasn't trying
to write a memoir. This wasn't a chronicle of my daily life in the
Brooklyn courthouse or a recitation of the elements of proof for a
heroin conspiracy charge. It was a novel. It needed to grab the
reader by the neck on page one, sustain interest over hundreds of pages
in the middle, and rush to a stunning and startling conclusion. I might
have harrowing inside details at my fingertips, but I was a novice when
it came to arranging them into a winning story. I needed a riveting
plot, compelling characters. I needed a surprise ending. I needed to
learn how to create suspense.
You see, if you're
doing your job right in law enforcement, there just isn't that much
suspense involved. In real life, you arrest a guy on -- say -- a heroin
charge. He's facing ten years to life in federal prison, so he decides
to talk. "Flip," we call it. He tells you, hey, the drug dealer
supplying heroin to my organization is a major player. He's moving
heavy weight every week out of such-and-such location. And, by the way,
remember those bodies that turned up a couple of months back with the
arms and legs chopped off? His people did that. I can ID the shooter
for you and tell you exactly where and how it happened.
Nine times out of ten, your informer is telling the truth, but you
still have to prove it. So you spend months meticulously building your
case from the ground up, looking for corroboration and admissible
evidence. You use all sorts of tried and true but dull investigative
techniques, like subpoenas for telephone or bank records, and drawn-out
wiretaps that require tons of paperwork. And you end up with a solid
case against the same guy you knew months ago committed the crime. No
gun battles, no stay-up-all-night suspense, no big surprises. Hardly
the stuff of great fiction.
So the first thing I did was sit down and spend six months pounding out
a pretty rough first draft. I literally threw that draft away -- didn't
even keep a copy. But it was invaluable, because I got the bones of my
book down. I had my basic cast of characters, led by federal prosecutor
Melanie Vargas, who decides to go after a headline-grabbing murder case
at the worst possible moment in her personal life -- when she has a new
baby at home and discovers her husband is cheating. The first draft
also contained a host of secondary characters who I knew were keepers,
from Melanie's overbearing boss Bernadette, to the sexy-as-hell FBI
Agent Dan O'Reilly, to the wealthy, silver-tongued murder victim Jed
Benson, to Slice, the psychotic killer suspected in Benson's death. And
it had the basic plot as well: murderer kills victim with the
assistance of certain surprising accomplices; prosecutor must solve
crime before she becomes the next victim. Now I had something to work
with.
But a lot was missing, and I wasn't even exactly sure what. I felt the
draft was flabby. It had too much detail in the wrong places. And it
wasn't scary enough. So I decided to take a break, and use the time to
embark on a big reading campaign. I wanted to go back and re-read my
favorite suspense writers to get a better feel for what made them so
masterful and their books so compulsively readable.
The basic answer turned out to be pretty obvious: great characters,
evocative settings, believable dialogue, compelling plots. I felt I had
the seeds of those things, but I needed to work, work, work. I started
carrying a small notebook at all times to write down snippets of
overheard conversation, resonant song lyrics, powerful visual images
that I happened across in the course of a day. I saved the best things
and worked them into my draft. I revised dialogue again and again, read
it aloud, played with it in my head, until I was sure it sounded right.
And I paid attention to the technique
in my favorite books. I read "above the lines," as they say. Here are a
few of the things I observed that helped me improve my own writing:
Point of View. I
realized that generally the suspense novels I found the most engrossing
were written in the third person and frequently told the story from
more than one viewpoint. I had been working in the first person, but
ultimately this felt too limiting technically. I wanted to show the
reader action beyond things that happened directly to my protagonist. I
wanted to write the killer in his lair polishing his knife, or the
innocent eyewitness watching television late at night, unsuspecting,
about to be disemboweled. I wanted to plant clues for the reader that
the protagonist was unaware of. I wanted to branch out and make my
story bigger and more memorable.
Cliffhangers and a ticking clock. I
realized I just hadn't structured my book carefully enough. I needed to
pay more attention to the transitions between chapters, to give the
reader that burning desire to keep turning the pages. I needed to hold
back more, tease more. And it couldn't hurt to come up with a good
"ticking clock" -- a bomb that would explode and kill the
characters if not defused in time. My favorite ticking clock of all
time is the girl in the pit in Silence of the Lambs, who will
die within days if Clarice Starling doesn't catch the killer. I went
back and re-worked my draft, paying much more attention to these
structural elements, and really giving serious thought to how I could
build suspense with each chapter.
Misdirection. I
also realized I was too closely wedded to my real-life law enforcement
experience, where we generally knew who the villain was from the
outset. That just didn't make for compelling narrative. So I set about
crafting sub-plots that would provide alternative scenarios for the
murder. They had to be credible and well-realized enough to throw
readers off the scent, so when the true killer(s) were revealed in the
end, there would be an element of surprise.
Armed with these
observations, I sat down and did what every real writer must do: spend
huge gobs of time rewriting, rewriting and rewriting again. And that,
ultimately, was the real lesson I learned. No matter how much I thought
I knew about crime, there was plenty more to learn about writing, and
always a way to improve that once-blank page.
Michele
Martinez, a graduate of Harvard University and Stanford Law School, is
a former Assistant U.S. Attorney. Her debut thriller, Most Wanted,
is available in hardcover from William Morrow and audio CD from
HarperAudio wherever books are sold. For more information, visit http://www.michelemartinez.com
|
