She drifted around for a while, drinking too much, not able to find a job or career that really appealed to her. An out of the closet lesbian, Micky slept around a lot, but never really connected with anyone.

One job she ended up in was as a security guard for a warehouse. Her boss did some private detective work on the side and asked Micky to help him out several times. As they worked well together, he asked Micky to join him when he started his own agency. But he eventually wanted their relationship to be more than just professional, and Micky decided that it was time to move on.

And so the M. Knight Detective Agency was born.

1. No, It’s Not Okay to Email Your Four Hundred and Sixty-two Page Manuscript.

Or even your fifty page first chapter. The gods of Office Depot do not give editors price breaks on printer paper, toner cartridges, etc. If you, the author, aren’t willing to tend to your brand new spanking baby book, then it’s ever less likely that an overworked editor wants to take on the task. Think about it this way, the editor can pick up a nice, crisply printed manuscript, plop down in her favorite recliner and read, or she can squint at a computer screen that she’s been squinting at all day or spend her time, her money (on the cost of printer paper, toner, etc) on printing out your manuscript before she can finally plop down to read it.Which of those editors do you want reading your book? What does it tell an editor about your commitment and willingness to do the work required during editing when you’re trying to get out of even just printing it?

2. Follow Directions

While it may seem that publishers are in a conspiracy to force you to make changes every time you have to submit a manuscript, this is not the case. We’re not that organized . . . we make rules for several reasons, including, to discourage the, shall we say, very creative souls, who submit manuscripts in rosy Unique and Interesting Fonts, which are very hard on eyes over forty (and not fun for eyes under forty, either). A similar format also allows us to quickly find the information we need, as well as giving guidance to those who prefer to have concrete guidelines to follow. If you don’t follow the directions, we may assume that you can’t read, can’t be bothered or have unilaterally decided that the rules don’t apply to you. Not a good first impression. If there is some really good reason, like you are using a typewriter, and not a computer and it’s a royal pain to re-format, then you can be the exception. Note the ‘really good reason’ part. ‘It’s a pain and I’d rather spend my time writing’, ‘the Xena rerun/WNBA game was on and I was too tired afterward’, ‘my ex-girlfriend set up the computer for me and I haven’t a clue as to how to reformat’ are not good reasons. Life is a learning curve. Your next girlfriend may be into needlepoint and not computers, so you might as well learn how to re-format now. Keep in mind that many editors are also writers and we’d rather be writing than trying to decipher your Unique and Interesting Font. Boring manuscript guidelines are all part of the writing life.

3. We’re Human

The reality is that many of us reading your manuscript have other jobs besides book publishing. We also occasionally do indulgent things like eat and sleep. All these take big chunks of time out of our days and leave only small chunks for reading manuscripts (and a few other things like pets, girlfriends, watching important sporting events). It may take us a while to get to the reading of your submission. We are not doing this to drive you crazy. Really, we’re not. It may sound crazy that it takes us two months to read the fifty pages that you submitted, but keep in mind we may have 30 other fifty page submissions that came in before yours, plus a number of books that are in various stages of editing and printing, plus all the exigencies of running a business (correspondence, keeping records, promotion, meetings, etc.) plus our day jobs, plus things like the aforementioned sleeping and eating. (And you don’t want us hungry or tired when we get to your submission). We will get to you as soon as we can.

4. Don’t write ‘The End’, print it and sent it off.

Read it AT LEAST ONCE. Get your English major friends to read it AT LEAST ONCE. Find, create, crash a writing group and get them to read it AT LEAST ONCE. Notice a theme here?

5. What’s in a name?

Characters names shouldn’t change midway through the book. JoLene shouldn’t become JanAnne in the second half of the book. Nor should her eye color/hair color, etc., change. (If you read it AT LEAST ONCE, you have a chance of catching these things).

6. Who knows where the time goes?

It can take weeks of real time to write one day of novel time. It may be five days before you get back to writing a scene that happens five minutes later in the novel. Don’t skip from Monday to Friday without any explanation of where the time went. Also make passing time realistic. If your cop character gets woken up with a phone call at midnight, then goes to a murder scene, interviews several witnesses, goes back to the station to write a report, then drives by her girlfriends house, notices a light on, stops by, they make passionate love, and then the cop goes home, the following chapter shouldn’t start with the cop being again woken up with the phone, but this time it’s 4 a.m. on the same night.

7. What are crocodiles doing here?

If a Louisiana editor is reading along and come to a scene in a swamp outside New Orleans and you throw in some menacing crocodiles, we’re going to know that you didn’t do your research and that we can’t trust you to get your facts right. (Crocodiles are only in Southern Florida, all we have here are alligators.) After tripping over that, we’re going to wonder just what else you guessed at. You may think that the detail you’re fudging on is pretty obscure, but someone, somewhere knows how it really is. You don’t have to stop writing in the middle of a scene and look up the territory and range of large reptiles, but you do need to go back in the rewriting and make sure that you’ve gotten the details right.

8. Where did the woman in the red dress go?

If you open the book with a scene in which your characters follows a mysterious woman in a red dress, then that character shouldn’t just disappear without a trace for the rest of the book. Or as Checkov said, ‘If you put a gun on the stage in the first act, it should go off by the third act.’

9. Avoid clichés like the plague (ahem).

Unless you want your character to be someone without original thoughts, clichés are far too general for the specific story that you are telling.

For example:

She was as cold as ice.
She was as cold as the ice in a glass of off-label Scotch.
She was as cold as the ice that sank the Titanic.

It was quiet, too quiet.
It was quiet, the silence a gazelle heard just before the lion pounced.
It was quiet, the street deserted, the bars closed, the absence of the earlier drunken laughter and pounding music turned the street desolate and lonely.

While not likely candidates for future editions of Bartlett’s Quotations, the latter sentences do convey more specific images and information than the preceding clichés.

10. But wasn’t she just in Biloxi?

Transitions are important to help the reader place the characters in both time and place. ‘She kissed her good-bye, then hurried to her truck, having just enough time to make her flight to Oshkosh,’ is better then ending one chapter with two women kissing in Biloxi and then the main character suddenly in Oshkosh, by gosh. When your character heard the strange noise in the back yard, did she pause to put on clothes or is she out there investigation stark naked? Or if she’s pointing a gun at the bad guys, when and where did she get it?

11. Avoid the ‘stupids.’

A character who has gone to town to pick up some milk, shouldn’t make a comment in any conversation that takes place while she’s away. Make sure if your character drives her car there, she leaves with it–and everyone else who came with her, or at least explain why they’re in the middle of the woods, but will get a ride with someone else. (“Waitin’ for the big bad wolf . . .” is better than stranding your minor characters in the middle of nowhere.)

12. Avoid the really ‘stupids’.

Your main character must confront the bad guys in a dramatic fashion. So, you have this intelligent, insightful, competent character decide to go out to the graveyard in the middle of the night without telling anyone where she is going, forget taking a cell phone or a gun, she doesn’t even take a butter knife to defend herself with. Other than a plot need for a dramatic scene about right now, there is no compelling reason why this main character has decided that the confrontation has to happen now, or that she can’t call the cops or at least her entire softball team with every bat they own.

Yes, you can have your character in the graveyard in the middle of the night, but you have to set it up. For example, her cell phone battery is dead, her gun out of ammo, she has just learned that the kidnapped child and her two puppies are being held in the graveyard, the parents are about to hand over the ransom money and that the kid and the adorable puppies will be history the second that happens. No one else is close enough to the graveyard to get there in time. Instead of being stupid, your character has no choice.

13. Made up grammar rules are about as annoying as unique and interesting fonts.

A period is a stop sign. If you don’t want to drive in a world without stop signs, don’t make us read in one. If you don’t want to memorize the Chicago Manual of Style (and that, admittedly takes a special talent) cultivate dork English major friends. Buy them dinner/a decent bottle of Scotch/whatever it takes to have them read your manuscript and put the commas in the right place and to point out that people rarely use semi-colons the way you have.

14. Make a friend of pronouns.

“The tall, dark haired lawyer crossed the room to the shorter, blond dork English teacher. The taller woman put her hand on the blond woman’s shoulder, looking deeply into the blond woman’s blue eyes. The dark haired woman asked the blue-eyed woman her opinion on semi-colons. The shorter, slightly dorky teacher recited verbatim the relevant passages from three grammar reference books. The taller woman fell asleep midway through the first reference.” Name your characters early, between their proper names and the skillful use of pronouns, you can avoid re-describing them five times every page. Or remember your Strunk and White and “Omit unnecessary words.”

15. Some books to have on your special writing shelf:

A good dictionary. It doesn’t have to be the OED (Oxford English Dictionary–you know, the one in libraries with the magnifying glass chained to it) but it shouldn’t be high school level either.

Roget’s Thesaurus, yes, we know you mostly use whatever is on your computer, but sometimes you just need another word.

A good style manual. The Chicago Manual of Style is the one most used by book publishers. There are others, some more suited for academic work or journalism. Anything is better than nothing.

Strunk and White, Elements of Style. It’s short, and the advice is still good.

The Most Important Thing

The first rule–really the only rule, the one you can never break or get around, is that you have to do the work. A book doesn’t get written in a burst of inspiration. A book gets written day after day, page by page by page. Sometimes it takes years and you will have to claw time out of your days when too many things already demand your time. The part of writing that’s seen, open to public scrutiny–the book signings, readings, articles in the paper or on radio or TV–is about five percent of what an author does. The other ninety-five percent is sitting alone in our rooms starting at a computer screen or page in a typewriter or a blank sheet of paper.

My friends (and these are my friends, goodness knows about other people) think I’m strange. The last time I turned my TV on was when there was a major hurricane heading straight for New Orleans. My to-be-read stack has forced me to believe in reincarnation–two or more lifetimes is the only way I’ll get through it. I triage my social engagements, and often avoid all but the necessary ones–”Damn, two weddings and a funeral this month, I’ll never get any writing done.” That’s a bit of an exaggeration–sometimes I skip the weddings . . . .

For me the magic in writing occurs in those lone moments with the words on the page. Have I caught something, trapped a world with words, put people in it, real cantankerous people with messy needs and desires?

If you want to be a writer, the first question to ask yourself is: Can I cleave to the first rule? Do I have the discipline to write day after day–to have to miss a few days or weeks because of work or other commitments and still come back to the writing–day after day, month after month, year after year? If you think that writing is about having adoring fans waiting in hushed silence for your autograph and chunks of money being flung into your bank account–well, it might happen–meteorites fall from the sky, lightning strikes odd and improbable places. I know a number of writers, but only one who actually earns her living by writing (not me, alas). Write because of the words on the page, writing for riches and fame will not sustain you.

Character

Story comes from the intersection of who and what. Who the characters are will determine how they will react to the body in the parlor. We don’t expect the same response from Colonel Mustard that we get from Miss Scarlet. But don’t assume that Miss Scarlet will scream, while Colonel Mustard will remain stoic.

It’s okay to steal–borrow might be the better word, though you won’t be giving anything back–from people you know, people you’ve seen, people you’ve read about, but make sure that you don’t remain locked into, “But she would do it that way.” At some point your characters grow up and take on a life of their own. Real life isn’t fiction.

Know why your characters do things, even if it is an irrational why. If your dainty, 5’2″ female detective is going to chase down the ally after the three big thugs, we have to know why she would do something like that. “Well, there’s no story is she doesn’t,” might be the real reason, but you have to give the reader some reason to believe that she would do such a foolish thing. Revenge? They kicked her beloved dog? Because they hold the key to the case she’s trying to solve and if she doesn’t catch them, she doesn’t get paid and if she doesn’t get paid, she gets evicted and can’t meet her car note? And she really, really likes her car?

I don’t have a formula for writing character. Some people note down complete backstories for their characters–what they eat for breakfast, where they were born, their grade point average in high school–none of which appears in the books. I don’t. I tend to be at the far end of the spectrum of what I’ll call ‘head’ writers. I don’t do an outline for any book and my notes are confined to a notebook that I keep handy in which I occasionally scribble down ideas or plot lines or snatches of dialogue. But I can tell you what my characters have for breakfast, where they were born, etc. I just never write it down. However, pay no attention to how I do it, do what works for you. To be creative enough to write, you have to be creative enough to find your own way of writing.

To me the most important rule for character is to be honest. We’re all messy, mixed up people who sometimes do the wrong thing for the right reason and the right thing for the wrong reason. So will your characters, if you are honest with them. What fascinates me and keeps my characters interesting to me, is the internal struggle they wage–how do ‘good’ characters overcome their desires to be selfish, to be needy, and how do ‘evil’ characters succumb, what pulls them down, what do they get from it, how do they justify their choices? I think to be honest with your characters, you have to be honest with yourself–how were you able to spend a year taking care of your dying mother? Why did you cheat on the test? Did you pass on that bit of malicious gossip about your best friend’s new girlfriend that you don’t like or did you keep it to yourself? What pivot allowed you to forgive your brother? Acknowledge that you’re a messy person with conflicting desires and aspirations, angers and temptations, virutes and vices. Be willing to explore the far reaches of your soul and you will find all of your characters there.

Suspense

People often tell me that they ‘couldn’t put my book down.’ As with character, I have no formula for creating suspense. My best advice is to make it matter. Make us care about the people and what happens to them. If we care about the person killed or wronged–it doesn’t always have to be murder–it can be a poison pen letter, something stolen–if we care enough about the people in the book we will care what happens to them. (I personally don’t like using murder is shorthand for saying ‘this is important, of course a dead body means that the detective must solve the mystery.’ Make us see why this dead body is important and what compels your detective to have to solve the crime.)

There are a few ‘cheap’ tricks for ratcheting up suspense. Time is one of them. Give us a deadline. A kidnapped child who will be killed in three days. The bomb goes off at five p.m. just when the rush hour crowds will be leaving. Your detective has two days to prove her harebrained theory and then she’s fired/the computer is taken away/etc.

Add obstacles. In one of my books, I have my detective wounded in the leg, and having to escape from the bad guys by trekking through a swamp. Loss of blood makes her progressively weaker, she stumbles over snakes and sinks into mud holes. Make the obstacles real–to use my example, the snakes work in a Louisiana swamp, but might seem contrived on the streets of New York. (Unless earlier you’ve planted a very good reason for there to be mean snakes on the mean streets.)

Location, location, location. Some places are more suspenseful than others. Swamps vs. convents, for example. Put the detective in an unfamiliar place–or a familiar place that discombobulates your detective, such as the scene of a previous murder or the place her mother abandoned her. Make it a confined space such as a warehouse or on board a ship with no escape. Or have a scene of mayhem–the detective and the bad guys weaving through the madness of Mardi Gras, with masked people and surreal costumes on every corner.

Suspense isn’t just a madly rushing plot, page after page of bad men with guns going after your detective becomes wearying after awhile. Is it a .45 or an AK47 won’t keep most readers on the edge of their chair. For me, real suspense always starts with character, how does this person handle this problem? In The Intersection of Law and Desire, my character was given the task of investigating a possible case of sexual abuse. The questions I wanted to explore were: How did her past history of having been abused affect her handling of this case? Would she cross the line into obsession–doing anything to prevent what had happened to her happening to another girl? What damage would the forced revisiting of her past have on her, on her sexuality, on her relationship with her lover? It was her struggle with all these issues, not just finding out ‘who dunnit’ that made the story interesting for me to write, and hopefully, for others to read.

If the struggle of good vs. evil is easy–wonderwoman sucker punches the bad guys–then the end is a forgone conclusion and suspense is lost. If the struggle of good vs. evil is not only hard, but not always clear cut–the bad guys aren’t totally bad and the good guys have their faults and failings–then the struggle becomes a real battle and one that commands our attention. Keep your stakes not only high, but real. The destruction of the world is certainly high stakes, but unless the reader believes that the world may well be destroyed, the stakes are not real.

And Finally–

The only other rule is that if it works, it works. There are no other rules.

1/3 version

Bread Crumbs – about two of the supermarket canisters. 2/3’s one canister
5-6 big white onions 2 big white onions
3 bunches of green onions 1 bunch green onions
8-10 green peppers 3 green peppers
3 bunches of celery 1 bunch celery
3 bunches of fresh parsley 1 bunch parsly
2 quart containers of oysters (original notes—two big oyster things) 1 qt. oysters
6-7 lemons 3 lemons
sage
thyme
bay leaves
salt (if desired, I left it out this time)
pepper

Chop up everything. Put it in a big pot. Cook the veggies (onions, green onions, peppers, celery, parsley) in the big pot for about an hour, until they’re soft and that sort of army green color. Throw in the spices, about 5-7 crumbled up bay leaves, probably about a teaspoon or two of all the rest (except salt, go sparingly, there is probably enough salt in the bread crumbs). Mix it up well. While the veggies are cooking, chop up the oysters, squeeze the lemons (if you want to hew to the family traditions, grate some lemon zest, but I’ve found that the juice works just as well and is less messy).

Add the chopped oysters, the oyster liquid (check for shell bits, it’s not nice to crunch at Thanksgiving or X-mas) to the mix. Add the bread crumbs and the lemon juice (and zest and hope that someone will wash the grater for you). Mix it all together. It should have just a bit of tang in the taste, but not really taste lemony. Let it simmer for a bit, stirring between sips on your beer, wine, diet Pepsi or whatever it takes to get you through the holidays. It shouldn’t be soupy, but you still should be able to easily stir it.

At this point, you can stuff it where ever you would like to (assuming either consent or being dead, as in dead turkey or chicken, on the part of the stuffee). It can simmer happily along for a while until dinner is ready, unless dinner is more than twenty-four hours away.

Bon appetite.

The J.M. Redmann version of the recipe.