by guest-dude Mark Arsenault
(As promised, dudes, here are words from the actual person I’ve been talking bout. Mark is, of course, the talented author of Loot The Moon, the book I reviewed yesterday. The book is being released today. You can find it at the usual places. Give this dude a read. He’s got some good things to say. — Richard)
A cardinal rule of writing fiction is: “Show, don’t tell.”
In other words, don’t tell me that the character is angry, describe the hole he kicks in the sheetrock.
Guys are visual creatures. When we see something—by way of a descriptive word-picture—we learn it.
Whenever I think about this rule, I’m reminded of my dad. In my childhood, he was constantly telling me about the right way to treat people. But the lessons that lodged the deepest are the ones that he showed me.
Thirty years ago, when I was a 12-year-old Boy Scout, my dad asked me to take a drive with him. He needed my help, he said, which was the first lie he told that day.
This was just before Thanksgiving. We motored in his red Ford van to the supermarket and picked up a basket of food that my father had ordered ahead of time. This basket was overflowing with the provisions for a feast: a frozen turkey, canned and fresh vegetables, potatoes and squashes, chocolates, nuts and fruits. It might have weighed 40 pounds. My dad asked me to help him lug it to the van.
Looking back years later, I realized he really didn’t need a 12-year-old with licorice-stick arms to help carry that basket.
Back in the van, we drove to the home of a fellow Boy Scout, a developmentally disabled kid from a poor family in our rural working class town. I helped carry the basket to the front door.
My dad knocked, then told me: “Go along with what I say.”
When the family answered, my father, a Boy Scout leader, explained that he had entered names from our troop into a raffle for a food basket…and their kid had won.
The family was ecstatic. Their kid was a Thanksgiving hero.
It was a lie, of course. There wasn’t any raffle. My dad just didn’t want the family to feel like a charity case. My father and I have never spoken about what he did that day. There was no need. The lesson he showed me was that the kindest thing you can do for people—even more kind than buying them food—is to protect their pride. (Also a good way to avoid a fistfight; let the other guy escape an argument with some pride.)
When I created Billy Povich, the main character for my current mystery series, I simultaneously created Billy’s family. Billy lives with a lively 8-year-old son and an ailing father. They are three generations of men with the same name muddling along with no women in an apartment above a funeral home.
The Poviches are guys, so I can’t have them sitting around yakking about their feelings all day. The relationships between the characters must be defined by the action in the story—by showing.
It’s easy to show tension between Billy and his old man. They bicker sometimes. Both have sharp tongues.
To show love without a character saying the word is much trickier. It’s done by planting clues for the reader.
Some clues are subtle. For example, the Poviches always sit down together for meals. That’s a sign of a close family, and I’m betting the reader will pick up on this even if he or she doesn’t consciously think about it.
Other clues are more blatant. There is no elevator in the Povich’s apartment, and the father is in a wheelchair. Billy must carry the old man down the stairs. He carries him on his back in a timeless image of love that I stole from the Bible. Billy always carries him in silence, too, to protect the old man’s pride.
BIO:
Mark Arsenault is a Shamus-nominated mystery writer, a journalist, a runner, hiker, political junkie and eBay fanatic who collects memorabilia from the 1939 New York World’s Fair. His new novel is LOOT THE MOON, the second book in the Billy Povich series that began with GRAVEWRITER, a noir thriller praised for a fusion of suspense, humor and human tenderness.
Arsenault’s debut novel, SPIKED, (2003, Poisoned Pen Press) was a finalist for the Shamus Award for Best First Mystery. The story was drawn from his experience as a journalist writing about heroin addicts who lived desperate lives of crime, love and addiction beneath a railroad bridge in Lowell, Massachusetts. His follow-up novel, SPEAK ILL OF THE LIVING, (2005, Poisoned Pen Press) was inspired by two years of jailhouse interviews inside “Supermax,” Rhode Island’s most secure prison.
With 20 years of experience as a print reporter, Arsenault is one of those weird cranks who still prefers to read the news on paper. When he’s not at his keyboard, you might find him backpacking up the side of a mountain.
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