REED FARREL COLEMAN

Let’s Get Engaged

REED FARREL COLEMAN, called a “hard-boiled poet” by NPR’s Maureen Corrigan, has published twelve novels in three series and one stand-alone. He is the three-time winner of the Shamus Award and has been twice nominated for the Edgar. Reed has also won the Macavity, Barry, and Anthony awards. He is an adjunct professor of English at Hofstra University.

 

 

I may define myself as a writer, but I was a reader long before I ever put pen to paper or tapped out my first words on an ancient manual typewriter. Although my experience of reading has necessarily changed as a result of aging and my choice of career, I still get an incredible thrill at being transported beyond the bounds of my physical being by a collection of words printed in black ink on off-white pages. That ability of the printed word to transport us, to pull us out of our own lives and limited experiences into different universes—some very much like our own, some vastly different—is as close to real magic as we’re ever likely to get. But it isn’t magic, is it?

One of the first points I make to my students is that as genre writers—crime/thriller writers, in our case—we have an added burden when we sit down to write a novel or short story. Above all else, our job is to entertain the reader. By entertain, I don’t mean to simply amuse or distract. Here I am using a broader definition of the word, a definition that obliges the writer to engage his or her readers on several levels.

If we can’t do that, none of the rest of what we do matters. All the beautiful, poetic, and succinct prose you can muster won’t count if you can’t get the reader to keep turning the pages in one direction. Weighty and significant themes, fully developed characters, a wonderfully constructed plot—none of it will matter if our words go unread. You can’t engage and entertain an audience that isn’t paying attention.

For my students’ sake, I do this gesture where I reach up, grab my own shirt collar, and pull my face into the pages of an open book. It’s kind of goofy, I know, but it makes the point. Pull the reader in early or risk losing the reader completely. Too often in the crime/thriller genre, nascent writers take this admonition about engaging the reader to mean they should supply a corpse on page one, preferably in line one of the first paragraph. While that can work and has worked and will probably continue to work, it’s dreadfully unoriginal and not really a formula for long-term success. Besides, the success of any ploy is at least somewhat dependent upon the writer’s talent and skill. Clichés can work, but to make them engaging sometimes requires more effort than it’s worth. What I’m saying is that in this genre there are a hundred, a thousand different ways to engage readers that don’t involve a corpse or a guy walking into a bar waving a gun.

I found that poignancy works for me. I don’t go for the throat, I go for the heart and I go for it right away. I like to set the tone, to reach right up to the reader in the first few lines. Here are some first and second lines from my novels:

Nothing is so sad as an empty amusement park. And no amusement park is so sad as Coney Island. (from Soul Patch)

 

Katy’s blood was no longer fresh on my hands and after 9/11 people seemed to stop taking notice. (from Innocent Monster)

 

We walked through the cemetery, Mr. Roth’s arm looped through mine. The cane in his left hand tapped out a mournful meter on the ice-slicked gravel paths that wound their way through the endless rows of gravestones. (from Empty Ever After)

Poignancy is what I’m comfortable with, but I use other ways to lure the reader in when the book I’m working on calls for it. For instance, when I was writing The Fourth Victim under my pen name Tony Spinosa, poignancy was definitely not the way to go. So I went with this: “At his best, Rusty Monaco was a miserable, self-absorbed prick and tonight he was paying even less attention than usual to the world outside his head.”

New York Times–bestselling author Lee Child engages the reader by getting the reader to see through his protagonist’s eyes. Lee is very skilled at putting you, the reader, inside Jack Reacher’s head. Readers can’t help being pulled into a book if they are inside the protagonist’s head. But no matter how you pull the reader in, no matter your method of engaging the reader, get to it early. Here are some examples of how different authors pulled me into their books from the get-go.

Ree Dolly stood at break of day on her cold front steps and smelled coming flurries and saw meat. Meat hung from trees across the creek. The carcasses hung pale of flesh with a fatty gleam from low limbs of saplings in the side yards. (from Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell)

 

Thrill parties every night over on Hussel Street. That tiny house, why, it’s 600 square feet of percolating, Wurlitzering sin. Those girls with their young skin, tight and glamorous, their rimy lungs and scratchy voices, one cheek flush and c’mon boys and the other, so accommodating, even with lil’ wrists and ankles stripped to pearly bone by sickness. (from Bury Me Deep by Megan Abbott)

 

When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon. (from The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley )

 

It’s almost impossible to be thrown out of the Garda Síochána. You have to really put your mind to it. Unless you become a public disgrace, they’ll tolerate most anything.

I’d been to the wire. Numerous

Cautions

Warnings

Last chances

Reprieves

And still I didn’t shape up. (from The Guards by Ken Bruen)

 

Suicide bombers are easy to spot. They give out all kinds of telltale signs. Mostly because they’re nervous. By definition they’re all first-timers. (from Gone Tomorrow by Lee Child)

 

If I’d blinked, I would have missed it. (from Learning to Swim by Sara J. Henry)

Remember, engage the readers early. Grab them by the collar and don’t let go. Keep them turning the pages in one direction. Appeal to the readers’ hearts, their minds, their senses. Don’t limit yourself to clichés. If you lose readers’ attention, you lose them. If they’re engaged, if you’re entertaining them, not only do you have them where you want them, you have them where they want to be.

EXERCISE

1. Write the first line or two of a novel appealing to one or more of the reader’s senses.

For example: When Joe Mulligan rapped on the perp’s door, there was an odd mix of scents in the air. Burnt bacon and death, he thought, burnt bacon and death.

2. Write the first line or two of a novel appealing to a reader’s sense of place.

For example: There was always more to the weather at Coney Island than the temperature. The wind howled through the abandoned rides, their rusting superstructures creaking like old bones.

3. Write the first line or two of a novel appealing to a reader’s sense of fear.

For example: The coffin lid collapsed in on her as the dirt poured over it. The pressure of it squeezing the breath out of her lungs. She clawed at the raw pine, her nails snapping off, splinters burying themselves in her bloody fingers as she was buried alive.

4. Reveal a character’s major flaw in the first line or two of a novel.

For example: As usual Misha was disappointed and nothing disappointed her more than the self-doubt that twisted the image looking back at her from the mirror.