Learn to Write a Mystery

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Special announcement! Annamaria Alfieri is passing on a fabulous opportunity for our readers within hailing distance of New York City.

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Mystery Writers of America is offering a great course at an unbelievable price.  For just $50, you can learn or hone your skills under the tutelage of award-winning mystery writers.  I know most of the teachers.  They will be fascinating speakers as well as practical instructors.  This is a great opportunity.  Here are the particulars.

August 13, 2011

MWA University - New York | New York, National
Register NOW for MWA University - New York

Location: Fordham University School of Law
McNally Auditorium - Atrium Level
140 W 62nd St (between Columbus & Amsterdam Avenues)
New York, NY 10023

 

What: An entire day of top-notch classes. Novice or pro, you will benefit from hearing the experts discuss their strategies for all facets of writing and publishing.

Below is a schedule preview (subject to change).

8:15 - 8:50: Check-in

8:55 – 9:00: Welcome – MWA's Executive Vice President – LARRY LIGHT

9:00-10:00: After the Idea

Teacher: Jess Lourey (Jess Lourey is the author of the Murder-by-Month mysteries and a tenured professor of English and sociology at a two-year Minnesota college.)

"If you wish to be a writer, write." But how? You've got the great idea, the one that won't let you go, that embellishes itself as you walk around your day. But how do you grow that kernel into a compelling story, and where do you find the time? This class gives you the tools to turn a good idea into a great novel. Bring a notebook and writing utensil.

10:15 -11:15: Dramatic Structure & Plot

Teacher: Hallie Ephron (Hallie Ephron is the author of psychological suspense Never Tell a Lie, crime fiction book reviewer for the Boston Globe, and author of the Edgar-nominated Writing and Selling Your Mystery Novel.)

Since Aristotle, the three-act structure for storytelling has reigned supreme, but does it still hold true for modern crime writers? Is it the best way, or the only way, to tell your tale? Is plotting simply sequencing your scenes or is there more to it? This class will teach you the art of storytelling and plotting so your manuscript will attract the attention it deserves.

11:30 – 12:30: Setting & Description

Teacher: Daniel Stashower (Daniel Stashower is a two-time Edgar award winner, and a recipient of the Raymond Chandler Fulbright Fellowship in Detective and Crime Fiction Writing.

"I guess God made Boston on a wet Sunday," Raymond Chandler once said, and this seemingly tossed-off remark has much to teach us about the gentle arts of setting and description. This class will guide you through the process and potential pitfalls of choosing a setting, and explore the ways in which descriptive passages can be honed to illuminate characters and themes.

12:30 – 1:30: Lunch Break

1:30 – 2:30: Character & Dialogue

Teacher: Cordelia Frances Biddle (Cordelia Frances Biddle is an adjunct professor at Drexel University's Honors College. Her courses include "Writing Killer Fiction", "Character as Catalyst", and "Histories and Mystery." She has taught at Philadelphia's University of the Arts and Temple University. She's the author of a critically-acclaimed mystery series featuring heiress Martha Beale: The Conjurer, Deception's Daughter, Without Fear.)

From Agatha Christie's Miss Marple to Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlings, character is arguably the most memorable element of a mystery novel and a series. How do you create a full-realized unique protagonist that leaps from the page? How should you develop secondary characters as well as the protagonist's nemesis? This class will challenge you to eliminate cardboard characterizations and create something new and fresh.

2:45 – 3:45: Writing as Re-Writing

Teacher: Reed Farrel Coleman (Twice nominated for the Edgar® and a three-time winner of the Shamus Award, Reed Farrel Coleman is an adjunct professor of English at Hofstra University.)

If editing was good enough for William Shakespeare, it's good enough for you. More often than not, it's the things you remove, the tweaks you make, and the tinkering you do, that are the difference between another slush pile manuscript and a new book contract. There are some easy methods to learn and follow to help you develop an editorial ear. Give us fifty minutes and we'll give you a better chance with agents and editors.

4:00 – 5:00: The Writing Life

Teacher: Hank Phillippi Ryan (Winner of two Agatha Awards as well as the Anthony and the Macavity, Boston TV reporter Hank Phillippi Ryan has won 27 Emmys for her investigative journalism.)

"I write when I'm inspired, and I see to it that I'm inspired at nine o'clock every morning." That's how Peter DeVries balanced art and craft. What's the reality of the writing life? The journey from your great idea to 90,000 words will mean hours of solitude. Days of self-doubt. Revision. Rejection. And then--rejoicing. You'll often say: "I wish someone had explained this to me!" In this class, they will.

Cost: $50 for both members and non-members of Mystery Writers of America. You must register by Wednesday, August 3, 2011. Registration is limited to 200 people.

Click here for Registration Form



More info at : http://www.mysterywriters.org/?q=MWA-University

The Thrill of the Thrift Shop

I’m not sure when I got my taste for thrift shops. I think it was when I was first married, we had no money and every penny counted (not that they don’t count now!). I stumbled into a Salvation Army store that was near our house and it was like stepping into wonderland. Acres of used clothes for a song. I came home with a new wardrobe for under $10.00, and urged my husband to come with me next time. To his amazement some gentleman, just his size, had donated a whole collection of winter suits (Harris Tweed, no less), overcoats, and hand-knit sweaters. This same man came every year, twice a year, with equally elegant offerings, keeping Bob outfitted for life.

When our children arrived, I found another shop called “House of Bargains,” that kept our two girls clothed until they were teenagers and began to rebel. I must admit they did look a bit dowdy in some of the pictures we have of them as tots. The dresses are a bit long, the sweaters a trifle gaudy. But I know they never suffered from the cold.

But the real thrill of the thrift shop is the thrill of the hunt. The possibility that you will find some treasure that everyone else has overlooked. Antique shops are no fun because everything has been evaluated and priced already. There are no surprises, and seldom any bargains. But at thrift shops you never can tell. A few of my finds were – a set of eight cut glass wine glasses, a spinning wheel that actually worked, and some lovely antique jewelry. But my greatest windfall I landed just a few months ago. I wasn’t planning on shopping – actually I was in a rush – but I couldn’t pass my favorite thrift store on 3rd Ave. On an impulse, I went in. I swear this item had called to me. There it was, standing square in the front of the shop with a big sign hanging from it: $20. A wooden lectern bearing a massive Webster’s Dictionary that I’m sure had never been opened.

“Does the dictionary come with the stand?” I asked excitedly.

The salesman nodded and smiled.

I plunked down a twenty-dollar bill and said my husband would pick it up in his car tomorrow.
This handsome twosome now decorates our living room, and is a conversation piece as well as a very useful item. Despite the so-called convenience of online dictionaries and Kindle touch-type, instant definitions, there’s nothing like browsing through an enormous tome, pausing here and there at an intriguing, unknown word or a drawing of a sailing ship with all its masts and rigging labeled.

Sort of like wandering through a thrift shop and pausing before a strange cooking utensil. “Now what could that be for?” or a lace antimacassar like my grandmother used to have. Price? $1.50. I feel my dictionary on its lectern is a monument to a past that wasn’t all hat bad. And to think, I found it in a thrift shop!

Robin Hathaway

Insights from the Field

by Thelma Jacqueline Straw

My Kind of Guy

The first time I saw Robert M. Gates was at a meeting by-invitation-only at the New York Athletic Club. He had just been appointed head of the C.I.A. and his troops at the Association of Former Intelligence Officers snagged him for an evening presentation at the tony Manhattan Club.

As we waited for his entrance I was mightily impressed by the closed ranks of the men in dark suits and black shoes that ringed the entire perimeter of the room. I felt my very thoughts could be read and carefully scrutinized. The wall-to-wall guards were as still as the stones at Stonehenge. I was scared to breathe.

The new DCI did not walk in. He rushed into the room. You were aware a very important person had come in the door.

I don't remember much of WHAT he said that night, but HOW he spoke made such an impression I now feel deep emotion at the thought of his leaving the life of public service at a time when we so sorely need men of his brand of integrity and impeccable stature.

An historian by training, Gates was the first Secretary of Defense to work for two presidents of different parties.

I find it now historically touching that his Pentagon office with sweeping views of the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial and a Potomac River marina will soon be inhabited by another DCI I admire, Leon Paretta, also a faithful soldier for the homeland.

A native of Kansas, Bob Gates will not miss his heavy ubiquitous security entourage.

One of his first moves in his post Washington D.C. life to a calmer setting in Washington state will be to drive himself to Burger King!

With or without fries, Mr. Secretary???

Bob Gates, my kind of guy...


Under Attack?

Watched the famous golf game the other day down at Andrews Air Force Base.

Happiness all around. Long pants. Short pants. Shoes like teenagers wore in the Forties.

I grinned. Their families grinned. The world grinned.

Five hours long, the only focus an itty-bitty white ball, so tiny a puppy could push it in one of the teensy holes.

Maybe now they'd stop all the fussing and cussing. The Beltway would unparalyze. Jobs could flow. The " fractious, backbiting, finger-pointing, polarizing, partisan, kick-the-can-down-the-road brinkmanship" of Washington politics would cease.

Then, it s-l-o-w-l-y dawned on me: Out top three leaders were all standing on one small piece of green turf !!!

Ohmygod, WHAT IF?????

My POTUS, my Veep, and my Speaker . . . all so close on a minuscule piece of sod. One breath of the wrong wind could take them out quicker than you can read this sentence.

I know from Potential Disaster. I pour over those erudite tomes by my pals Vince and Tom and Brad.

And I keep an eye on those know-all pundits on CNN and MSNBC. Plus all 3 C-SPANS!

I know as much as Candy or Diane or Brian or Chuck!

I'm privy to all the esoterica that Bob Mueller 3, Leon CIA/DEF, Newt and Jay Leno know.

Did the Secret Service inspect every single ball? Somebody could insert a time-sensitive explosive in one of those toys! And if it rained somebody with an umbrella could shoot one of them with some of that ricin stuff.

Tom Clancy and Vince Flynn could tell you precisely how to do it.

And those fellas that help the bigwigs dress. Did they inspect all the pockets and drawer inseams?

Whew, I get nervous just thinking about what could have happened that nice Saturday down at Andrews golf course on that perfect grass.

Speaking of grass – didn't those bozos hear about how bean sprouts and cucumbers could gun you down? Think what poisoned GRASS could do???

I grab my Diet Coke and inhale a slug of caffeine.

Did the D.C. handlers realize the imminent dangers? Were the Secret Service only a heartbeat away – or were they taking a time-out to put new batteries in their ears or synchronize their Platinum Rolexes?

And that guy with the chain-cum-suitcase: Where was he on that piece of sod?

Was he wearing long or short pants?

Did he don golf gloves to better grab hold of his little powder keg?

Did the Andrews groundskeepers sniff every inch of that turf?

You can put one helluva punch in a pinch of explosives and hide it down in those teensy holes.

Ask the guys down at Quantico or over at Fort Detrick.

I got scared stiff. All those photo ops on TV. Every human on the planet could see MY guys were on their own.

And how about them Greys, snooping on us from their UFO cylinders in Outer Space???

Hey, don't get me started on THAT WHAT IF !!!

It's Getting Hot in Here

It's a little-known fact that summer weather in the Delaware Valley is quite similar to summer weather in Mississippi. Harold was born and raised in Mississippi; he likes it. I spent my best summers in Canada. I do not. It's one of the few subjects we disagree on, the others being the optimum distance for following the car ahead of you on the interstate and whether it's really a good idea to smoke cigars and drink whiskey.

Now that summer has come to Lambertville, I have begun resorting to the usual strategems to keep my brain from baking like a moist meatloaf, a process that begins somewhere between 83 F and 90 F, depending on the humidity. The steps that I take to cool the house are modest. There is a ceiling fan over the dining room table. I turn it on. There are windows. I close them about eleven a.m. As the steam rises on the streets outside, the animals seek shade, the plants revel in the wet warmth, and Harold relaxes on the front porch, reading a good book, enjoying the hot steam on his skin and lighting up another Ropo de Stinko, I retire to my office with a tall glass of iced limeade to see what sort of trouble my characters will get into next.

Sometimes I turn on the air conditioner in the attic and open the door, letting the cool air flow down into the second-floor hall, where it can be directed into the second floor rooms by means of whisper-quiet fans. Sometimes I put crushed ice on my neck, but only because the chiropractor said it was good for the pinched nerve. In this way we get through the summer.

You may ask yourself, why don't they have central air? First off, because Harold hates air conditioning even worse than I hate the heat, and secondly because neither one of us could stand the noise. To say nothing of forking over all that money to the electric company.

As far as I know we're both perfectly happy. And so to work. It looks like a hot one today.

Kate Gallison

The Criminal Psyche

A month ago, The Criminal Brain was my subject. Since then I have been thinking about something I learned years ago, an insight into the making of a criminal. The Keynote speaker at a Mystery Writers of America Edgar-Week Symposium was a gentleman from The Fortune Society, an organization that defines itself like this:

The Fortune Society is a nonprofit social service and advocacy organization, founded in 1967, whose mission is to support successful reentry from prison and promote alternatives to incarceration, thus strengthening the fabric of our communities.

The speaker at the symposium was an executive of the Society who was also an ex-convict. A man of about sixty, he described his life before he found The Fortune Society. He had been raised in New York City in several different foster homes, in many of which he was abused physically and sexually. As soon as he turned twelve years old, he started to run away from those toxic environments and from orphanages that were similarly horrifying. At the age of eighteen, he told us, he was “released to the streets of New York” without any preparation, support, or continuing guidance. Within a short time he was arrested for robbing a gas station. He spent the next twenty-five or thirty years in and out of jail for robbery, his final conviction as an accessory to murder, after he robbed a convenience store with a fellow ex-con who shot and killed the proprietor.

The Fortune Society’s counselors turned him around in his middle years. Eventually, he became one of those counselors himself. By the time he got to the stage of the MWA Symposium, he was an executive of the organization and very proud to tell us that he had a daughter who was starting college that year.

During the Q&A after his presentation, a member of the audience asked him if he had, in prison or as a counselor at the Fortune Society, ever met a violent criminal who had not been abused as a child. He said,”No.” He hadn’t. Not ever.

For the rest of that day-long symposium, cops, lawyers, FBI agents, criminal psychologists paraded across the stage, speaking on panels, telling us how to make our works of crime fiction more authentic. One or another member of the audience asked that same question of all of them: have you ever met a violent criminal who was not abused as a child. All of them, even the toughest New York cops, said, “No.” They hadn’t.

This is not a bleeding heart “they’re-depraved-on-accounta-they’re-deprived” argument; no rationale that society needs to go soft on criminals. It’s about insight. First and foremost about the possible causes of the kinds of crimes that get harshly punished in our society. (Unlike the unjustly lenient desserts doled out to greedy crooks who steal with a pen or a computer.)

Also, knowing this might help us crime writers infuse our bad guys with a dollop of childhood realism.

Annamaria Alfieri