People think they’re complimenting me when they say that sort of thing, and I suppose they are. After all, my name is on the cover. And I did create what’s inside.

As for the cover itself? Er, well . . .

For better or worse, those are almost entirely the work of our publishers.

The cover creation process works more or less like this:

1. A year or so before the book comes out, the publisher sends the author a cover art questionnaire that asks for stuff like physical descriptions of the main characters, the story setting, objects that play key roles in the plot, etc.

2. About six months later, the publisher sends the author an e-mail titled “Your cover!” or something similar. It contains a .jpeg or .pdf file of the cover. If an author is lucky, the e-mail may even contain two or three cover choices to choose from.

3. The author spends the next week showing the cover(s) to friends and family. If they ooh and ah over it (like they did with this one), the author does a Snoopy dance and begins fantasizing about how the cover could be adapted into a movie poster. If there are multiple options to choose from, the author picks one and the cover creation process is over.

4. But sometimes the informal poll turns up negative results. The author’s critique group gives only faint praise. A more experienced author opines that it’s “not an eye-grabber.” Even the author’s mother hints that it doesn’t quite do justice to the book. The author is distraught. His or her agent gets an anguished call and is begged to do something–anything–to fix the horrible cover that is about to doom the author’s career.

5. If the agent agrees with the author, the next step is a call to the publisher to explain that the cover isn’t quite as good as the publisher thought. Sometimes the agent can talk the publisher into redoing the cover and sometimes not. It depends on how much clout the agent has, how much money is left in the publisher’s budget for the book, and how much the publisher likes the original cover.

6. With luck, however, the agent can get the publisher to fix the problems. And pretty soon the author starts getting misguided compliments about what a great cover he or she created.

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Terrorists who hang around to admire their handiwork tend to have short careers.  So do authors.  It can be very tempting to keep writing after the plot has really ended.  The characters are fascinating, you’ve got some great description you’ve been waiting to squeeze in, and some unused witty dialogue that makes you laugh out loud every time you read it.  Readers won’t mind a few extra scenes, will they?

Yes, they will.

Romance or literary writers can let there stories drag on a little because their novels are character-driven, so readers will generally keep reading as long as the characters are doing something interesting.  Suspense novels, however, are generally more plot-driven.  A thriller that keeps going after the last thrill is like a joke that keeps going after the punch line.  Tie up any significant loose plot threads, but do it quickly.

And when you’ve run out of things that you need to say, stop writing.

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This is the hardest rule to implement, but also the most necessary.  In one sense, it’s impossible:  Before readers even pick up your book, they know that your hero(es) are almost certain to prevail in the end.  If terrorists are plotting to assassinate the president, they’re very likely to fail.  If a serial murderer is stalking a quiet college campus, the main character’s daughter probably will be safe in the end.

The trick is to keep surprising readers along the way.  For example, in The Day of the Jackal Frederick Forsyth tells the story of a fictional attempt to kill Charles de Gaulle.  Since de Gaulle was not actually assassinated, we know right off the bat how the story will end.  But we don’t know why it will end that way.  Forsyth does a magnificent job of keeping us off-balance throughout.  He creates twist after twist as the brilliant assassin, the Jackal, and French intelligence agents play a lethal game of hide-and-seek.  Even though we know who will win, we’re enthralled by the game.

There are plenty of good ways to create plot twists.  Forsyth does it by making both the Jackal and his pursuers smarter than we are; we can’t see their actions coming, but they make perfect sense in retrospect.  Unfortunately, that only works if you’re as smart as Forsyth.  An easier technique is to throw in a critical fact known to the characters (or some of them anyway), but not the reader.  For instance, your FBI agent protagonist could inexplicably destroy evidence that would put a mob boss away for life.  Why?  Because the agent and the mobster—but not the reader—know that the agent’s illegitimate son works for a mob-owned business and would be killed if the mobster went to jail.

You can also put your characters into unpredictable situations and see how they respond:  What happens when your blue-collar American detective has to find a killer who disappeared into the high reaches Brazil’s aristocracy?  Does he take a crash course in Portuguese and get himself a menial job at the estate of one of the killer’s relatives?  Does he find a Brazilian cop who knows the dirty laundry of his country’s privileged class and would like nothing better than to see one of them brought to justice?  Or maybe instead of a cop, the detective finds a well-connected drug dealer with whom he makes a Faustian bargain?

One caution:  Not all plot twists are your friends.  Two in particular should be used sparingly if at all.  The first is the Character Lobotomy, in which the author dramatically drops a character’s IQ in order to make the character do something inexplicably stupid to move the plot along.  The most common (but by no means only) example is the Talking Killer scene found near the end of most James Bond movies and Harry Potter books.  The villain has the hero trapped and need only kill him to be certain of victory, but the villain doesn’t do it!  Instead, he says in effect, “Shut up, you worm, and let me explain the plot to you before your improbable escape!”

The second treacherous plot twist is the Convenient Coincidence:  the scene where the heroine arrives in the split second between the end of the Talking Killer’s speech and the moment he murders the hero, for example.  Or the key inscription that can be read only because a character happens to be fluent in Medieval Urdu.  Or the Bible in the protagonist’s vest pocket that stops what by all rights should be a fatal bullet.  Again, it’s best to avoid these.

The problem with both Character Lobotomies and Convenient Coincidences, of course, is that they make your story less believable.  The minute readers stop believing your story, you’ve lost them.  The spell is broken.  They sit back from the edges of their seats, roll their eyes, chuckle, and toss your book onto a coffee table or into the dreaded library donation box.  Not a pretty mental picture, is it?  Don’t let it happen to you.

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Cara Putman and I will be answering those questions and more at the 2010 ACFW Conference (http://www.acfw.com/conference). We’ll be teaching two law-related workshops on Sunday, September 19: “Author Law 101” and “Legal Scenes Tricks & Traps.”

In Author Law 101, we’ll summarize what you need to know about the law as an author. First, we’ll give you a guided tour of a typical book contract and explain what the key terms mean and why they’re there. We’ll also outline the basic principles of copyright and libel law and give some practical tips on protecting yourself and staying out of dangerous areas. And if there’s extra time, we’ll tell some of our favorite lawyer jokes (e.g., What do you call it when a man-eating shark saves a drowning lawyer and carries him to shore? Professional courtesy).

Legal Scene Tricks & Traps will give you the tools to get your legal scenes right and illustrate some ways in which they often go wrong. We’ll open with a quick overview of how the legal world works: what the differences are between a civil and a criminal case, why some cases go to federal court and others to state court, and so on. Then we’ll go over some common examples of what I call Stupid Lawyer Tricks: things that lawyers often do in poorly researched movies or books, but that no competent lawyer would ever try in real life. We’ll also hand you a treasure trove of research tips and resources to bookmark for the next time you write a legal scene.

We’re looking forward to seeing you there!

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How do terrorists terrify? By being willing to commit disturbing acts that decent human beings would never consider. Aspiring suspense writer: Go thou and do likewise (at least in print).

It’s hard to create tension if your readers can sense that there are lines you won’t cross. Once they know that you won’t let anything really bad happen to “good” characters, most of the suspense drains out of what should be tense scenes. They know the sweet schoolteacher in the car crash will be okay, the deranged husband of the vulnerable young woman won’t actually kill her, and so on. How can you keep that from happening?

Fortunately, solving this problem is simple: Cross some lines. Kill the schoolteacher. Murder the innocent wife. While you’re at it, go ahead and kill the deranged husband too.

Are you crazy or just stupid? you ask. What kind of author would write a book like that? What kind of publisher would publish it? And what on Earth would readers think? I’m going to duck the first question and move straight to the others: The author is award-winning novelist James Scott Bell and the publisher is Center Street Books (the “traditional values” imprint of Hachette Book Group). In the first chapter—the first page![1]—of Bell’s Try Dying, a troubled man murders his wife and shoots himself on a highway overpass. His body falls onto the car of the nice schoolteacher, who dies. Readers loved it, and not a single review—or at least none that Google could find—complained about the opening.

Bell is a veteran storyteller and knows exactly what he’s doing. If a thug pulls a knife on a main character later in the book, we’re all on edge because we know there’s a real chance the character might be killed. Authors rarely kill main characters, of course, but they also almost never kill innocent and vulnerable women. Bell offed two of those on page one. Will he do the same thing to an important good guy? Maybe. We’re not really sure what he’s willing to do next, and that’s exactly how it should be.

One final note: Choose your lines carefully. You don’t want to cross a line that will turn off publishers or readers in your target audience. For example, note that Bell’s characters died on the first page of his book, before we really cared about either (though we come to care about both later as we learn more about them). When in doubt, run your scene or plot development past a professional editor or author who specializes in suspense.

[1] Remember last month’s post about starting with a bang?

Up next month in part #4: Keep Them Guessing. It will appear on Friday, November 20.

Rick Acker is a suspense novelist whose books include Blood Brothers (4 stars, Romantic Times), Dead Man’s Rule (4.5 stars, Romantic Times), and The Davis Detective Mysteries for tweens. His next book, When the Devil Whistles will be published by Abingdon in 2010. By day, he is a Deputy Attorney General in the California Department of Justice.

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Last month, we started this series by talking about how old-school terrorists and suspense authors are the same in one important way: Like terrorists, we want to create uncertainty and tension that makes it impossible for our victims (er, readers) to focus on anything except what’s going to happen next in the world we’ve created. Now we’re going to start digging a little deeper to see what we writers can learn from the PLO and Baader-Meinhof gang.

A good terrorist introduces himself with something flashy and devastating, right? So does a good suspense writer.

Readers who pick up a suspense novel are looking for suspense. Give it to them, hard and fast. Sure, it’s important to introduce your characters, describe your setting and so on. But don’t let any of those things get in the way of putting readers on the edges of their seats.

Remember how Robert Ludlum started The Bourne Identity? Despite the title of the book, Ludlum didn’t begin by introducing Jason Bourne or even telling us his name. Instead, chapter one opens with a nameless man bursting onto the deck of a ship during a raging storm. He is shot from behind, topples over the side and vanishes into the churning sea. We have no idea who the man is, what he’s doing on the ship or why he was shot. None of that matters, though, because we’re already hooked. As long as Ludlum answers those questions eventually, we don’t mind. What we really care about is what happens next.

The Bourne Identity is an extreme example, but a fair one. Virtually all good suspense novels start with a bang. Someone is shot, a child vanishes, a life is shattered by a horrible secret. Go to your bookshelf and pull down your favorite suspense novel. Read the first five pages. I guarantee that you’ll see a bomb go off. Sometimes it’s literal, other times it’s emotional or psychological, but it’s unmistakably a major explosion. Now read the first five pages of your WIP. Does something big blow up?

There are lots of ways to set off a bomb early in your book. One popular technique is to start with a tension-creating prologue that helps set up the main storyline. For example, if you’re writing a crime drama in which one of your characters is a suspected serial murderer, begin with a short prologue describing one of the murders, but don’t identify the killer. If you’re working on a vampire novel, you can open with a young woman who feels an evil breeze blow across her soul as she’s walking down a deserted street. Whatever you’re going to do, though, do it fast. Never give your readers an excuse to put your book down. If you do, chances are that they won’t pick it up again.

Up next month in part #3: Crossing Lines. It will appear on Friday, October 16.

Cross-posted at http://canblog.typepad.com/canbookmarketing/2009/09/the-author-as-terrorist-2-starting-with-a-bang.html#more

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Story summary. I try writing up a short informal synopsis of the plot. This is short–roughly 300-500 words. If I can’t turn it into something that “sings,” I know it’s probably a dud and I drop it.

Partner review. Next I find out whether my idea sings to my wife and writing partner, Anette. Anette has a very good eye for stories that work–and those that don’t. She’s also perfectly willing to “speak the truth in love” when an idea doesn’t quite make the cut, which is absolutely invaluable. But if she likes the story, I know I’ve got something worth taking to the next step.

Agent review. If Anette likes my idea, I turn the synopsis into something longer (ca. 1-2 thousand words) and more formal. I also do a little market research to make sure the story I’m proposing hasn’t already been written. Then I send it to my agent. He’ll let me know whether he thinks I’ve got a “big book” idea–one that’s not just publishable, but has a “wow” element that will make it stand out from the rest of the market.

Proposal. The final layer (short of actually writing the book) is creating the proposal. If the story still looks like a “big book” after two or three sample chapters and a marketing analysis, my agent starts pitching it to publishing houses.

BTW, fewer than 1 in 10 ideas make it all the way through this process and wind up as proposals. But well over half of the proposals sell.

Cross-posted at http://fictionmatters.blogspot.com/

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I love a good suspense novel–the kind that grabs you with the first line, slowly tightens its grip for 400 pages, and doesn’t let go until the very end. I’ve also written suspense since I was in high school, and now I even get paid for it.So when CAN invited me to join this blog, it was only natural to do a series of posts on suspense writing. The series is titled The Author as Terrorist because … well, keep reading and I’ll explain.

We’ve all read—or at least started to read—thrillers that failed to thrill. They never catch fire or lose our attention after twenty pages. Before you know it they’ve been tossed in the box of books we’re donating to the next library book sale. And those are the ones that got published; hundreds of thousands of suspense novels die every year in the slush piles of agents and editors, mourned only by their authors. What went wrong with these books? More important, what went right with books that did grab us?

Good suspense novels tend to have good writing, of course. We care about the characters, chuckle at the witty dialogue, and admire the vivid description—but any good novel should have all of that. What sets a good suspense novel apart?

The key to answering that question lies in one of the favorite axioms of writing guru Randy Ingermanson: The goal of all fiction writing is to create a powerful emotional response in the reader. A romance writer wants to inspire longing and love. A mystery writer strives for intense curiosity followed by satisfaction when the mystery is unraveled at last. A horror writer, of course, tries to horrify.

And a suspense writer should create suspense, right? Readers should genuinely think that something awful might happen to a character they really care about. Better still, readers should wonder what exactly might happen and to which character.

The best suspense writers tend to think like old-fashioned terrorists. Really. The main goal of most terrorists in the 1960s and 1970s was not to kill people or blow up buildings, but to create a pervasive atmosphere of fear and uncertainty that made it impossible for their fellow citizens to lead normal lives. That, of course, is exactly the effect we suspense writers want to have on our readers. We want to make them miss their bus stops, skip meals and stay up way past their bedtimes because they absolutely have to know what’s going to happen next.

Up next month in part #2: Starting with a Bang. It will appear on Friday, September 18.

Cross-posted at http://canblog.typepad.com/canbookmarketing/

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Is there really a Possumneck, Mississippi? Yes. The town itself is little more than some ruins and overgrown graveyards today, but it still shows up on maps and locals still refer to the northwest area of Attala County as Possumneck. Drugstores down there used to sell sweatshirts and mugs that said “Where the heck is Possumneck?” Alas, I haven’t been able to find any of these the last few times I’ve been there.

How big was the Demon Pig? I only saw its head, but I’m told the Demon Pig weighed over 300 lbs. In summer, it would’ve weighed around 450 lbs. While big, that’s only about half the size of the famous Hogzilla (http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Technology/story?id=599913).

Is everything in the Demon Pig story true? Yes. Er, well, with one exception. I said in the story that the severed pig head whispered, “My name is Legion.” I actually couldn’t make out what it was saying.

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Question: “I’ve heard that there’s really no such thing as a surprise witness. Is that true?”

Answer: Generally. Surprise witnesses are like car crashes: They rarely happen if everyone is paying attention and following the rules, but you’ll probably see one now and then anyway.

Why are surprise witnesses so rare? Before a case goes to trial, lawyers are allowed to engage in a lengthy process called discovery. They get to ask the other side for all sorts of information–including the identities of any witnesses their opponents may call. They then get to “depose” those witnesses, a process in which the witness is required to answer questions under oath for hours, sometimes days or even weeks.

And just to make sure neither side gets surprised, most courts require parties to exchange witness lists before trial. If there’s a surprise witness on one side’s list, the judge will generally either (a) give the other side an opportunity to depose the witness or (b) bar the witness from testifying.

With all those protections, how do any surprise witnesses wind up on the stand? Here are a few ways that can happen:

1. The surprise testimony comes during an emergency hearing (e.g., on a temporary restraining order, or TRO) and there’s been no opportunity to depose the witness or even find out who he/she is.

2. The other side makes a tactical decision not to depose the witness. For example, I saw this happen in a case where the witness lived in Greece and opposing counsel thought his testimony would be inconsequential. They took a gamble (a bad one as it turned out) and decided not go through the hassle of taking an international depo. This wasn’t technically an instance of a surprise witness so much as surprise testimony, but the effect was the same.

3. The lawyer who took the deposition (commonly called “depos” among legal professionals) didn’t ask quite the right questions or didn’t follow up sufficiently on a witness’s evasive or ambiguous answers. It’s common to have junior lawyers handle most of the depositions and other discovery, while senior attorneys handle the trial. As a result, the lawyer handling the examination at trial may take some calculated risks in asking questions that weren’t asked at the depo–and may get surprised as a result.

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