Writing Tip Wednesday: The Gun in the Drawer…

The audience settles. House lights dim. The curtain opens. The stage lights come up. On the stage, an opulent den. Big cushy leather chairs opposite an ornate desk. Well-stocked bookshelves along the wall. A globe on a stand. A character enters stage left. He reaches into his waistband and pulls out a revolver. He slides open the drawer and places the gun in, and slides it closed.

I guarantee you, from that moment on, everyone in the theater is focused on that drawer. The specter of it being within his reach charges every line of dialog with a subtext of impending confrontation. A normally innocent inquiry becomes a possible trigger to pull the trigger. “What did you do yesterday?” suddenly has a dark shade as the aura of the gun raises it to an interrogation tone.

It is the same as if a wife character learns she is pregnant but hides it from her loser husband. A husband who has lost his job and the family doesn’t know. The kid who flunked out but can’t tell his parents. The fiancée, who lost the engagement ring money at the racetrack. These too are guns in the drawer. They shape the trajectory of the dialogue and the character’s actions and responses to things.

Got it? Secrets. Below the text, subtext, charge the text. Now as a book coach I have found a very common error in most manuscripts is when the writer places the gun in the drawer, but it does not affect anything. Like it was never there. Secrets are prime character motivators. Secrets yield lies. Lies yield mistrust and mistrust yields suspense. All that takes a simple scene, sequence, or book and charges it with subtext.

For more writing tips to help you author your next novel, check out my online course, From Writer to Author. It will open up the drawer to your next manuscript!

The way Hitchcock thinks – beat by beat.

In a previous blog, I credit Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest as the reason I write thrillers. It wasn’t until I had years of writing and learning under my belt that I discovered what his secret was.

Alfred started in film as a graphic artist making dialog cards for silent movies. Before sound came to movies, the film would show an actor “speaking at, or to, or with another character on the screen. Immediately after that, the film cut to a card that had the printed dialogue the audience just saw the actor mouthed. In the silent world of movies back then, the dialogue was very sparse. Actors had to show emotion, often with bigger-than-life gestures and posturing. A certain amount of lip-reading gave the audience satisfaction when the card that followed proved that they had guessed right about what the actor silently said. Every once in a while, a non-dialogue card would appear. This card was the narration explaining some essential notion, change of heart, or change of scene the audience needed to know to avoid confusion. A famous one was ‘meanwhile, back at the ranch…’ Usually cut in between the hero making googly eyes at the pretty girl in town while the cattle rustlers had their pickings of his herd back on his spread.

The sparsity of words in a silent film forced filmmakers to be extra judicious in the words they sparingly shared with the viewer. This beyond anything else, taught Hitchcock the power of the beat. The point of inflection, reversal, or expansion of the story or plot. It’s what separated a narrative film from the other choices moviegoers of that day had the choice of seeing*. And when you do break the story down to the most essential words, you realize very quickly what is driving the story forward and what is causing it to stall. The beats were the cards he created. The frequency and duration of the cards, both dialogue and narration set the tempo of the film – the beat. Delay the beat, and you create suspense! He was the master of suspense because he knew which beat and how long to delay it!

When we author a book it’s important to honor beats and make sure we are building our story on and around them. How do you know what a beat isn’t? Hitchcock explained it to François Truffaut once with the observation; What is drama after all but life with all the dull bits cut out? When you cut the dull bits out of life, or in your manuscript, the beats are pretty much what you are left with.

I go into the beat a little deeper in my really affordable eBook on Kindle, Intentional Thoughts from The Accidental Author, and take a deeper dive into these essential building blocks of good stories-well told in my online course, From Writer to Author, available HERE!

* Amazingly these were just motion pictures featuring 20 minutes of a train chugging along or boats on a river or a San Francisco streetcar. No plot, no story, just the fascination with the motion of the “flickers.” Thomas Edison who invented modern motion pictures was amazed that in his showing of the train movies, new-to-film audiences actually ducked or ran aside as the train came towards the camera!

New Year’s Resolution – then conflict, then plot, character, and setting.

If you recognize the above as the five essential elements of a novel, then you’ll appreciate the writer’s resolution. For many, it’s “I resolve to finish that book!” For a thousand times that many, it’s, “Start that book!” And for a much smaller group, it’s “Write a better book!”

If any of that sounds familiar, here’s mine, “I resolve to help writers become authors.“

Not just a “gonna get to that someday” affirmation, but the train is already leaving the station, which is an appropriate analogy since I devised the following on the subway. I’ve created a series of online lectures to help writers of any level elevate their craft and get to the next plateau in their careers.

Followers of this blog for the last ten years know my story well, but to encapsulate it: I stumbled into my first manuscript, which became my first published novel and my first number 1 bestseller…by accident. Hence my handle as The Accidental Author. I am, quite literally, the last guy on the planet to have 4 number 1 bestsellers. The route I took was practical, empirical, and devoid of traditional literary frameworks.

Admittedly, what I will be sharing with those who take the 15 classes that I am offering at The Academy of Creative Skills is my journey to the satisfaction of being a published author many times over. This unique perspective on the craft of writing will have many touchpoints and resonant notes for writers who are heading towards authoring commercial fiction, screenplays, and even non-fiction. After all, it’s always about a great tale well crafted. 

As a premier to the course or as a standalone compendium of tidbits, nuggets, and cues, based on my experiences and lessons in developing my craft, I’m offering an ebook on Amazon entitled, Intentional Thoughts from the Accidental Author. Chock full of lots of handy dandy insights and goodies about the art we love so much.