At the MWA SoCal chapter’s Holiday Party last weekend, a fellow author I much respect asked me an interesting question:

“How do writers get better?”

Well, that’s the mystery we’re all trying to solve, isn’t it? What exactly do good writers do to become great ones? Try harder? Read more? Make a blood pact with the devil?

No. Here’s what I think writers do to get better:

1. They listen to their conscience.

You know the conscience I mean. Not the one that tells you not to cheat on your wife, or screams bloody murder when you’re contemplating voting Republican. The conscience I’m talking about is the inner-voice that nags you like a Jewish mother when:

a) The line of dialogue you’ve just written sounds like something a walk-on in a bad soap opera would say;

b) There’s a hole in your plot that needs filling worse than a painful tooth cavity;

Or (nightmare of all nightmares) . . .

c) The whole third act of your latest novel-in-progress is garbage that has to be tossed, and any further attempts on your part to “fix” it instead will be as pointless as racing stripes on a Segway.

Sure, every author heeds such warnings most of the time; the nagging’s just too insistent to do otherwise. But I think many writers turn a deaf ear to their inner-editor more often than they listen to it, because fixing things that are broken is work, and it takes time, and it’s a hell of a lot easier to convince yourself that what your writer’s conscience is telling you is not sound editorial advice, but the baseless grumblings of insecurity.

“Of course that line of dialogue is fine,” these people think to themselves. “I’ve rewritten it four times already, how could it not be?”

Well, here’s the answer to that question: For some authors, the fifth time is the charm, not the third. I know because I’m one of them. It ain’t fair, but that’s just how it is.

2. They don’t settle for “good enough.”

Overhauling one’s writing to fix something that flat-out doesn’t work is a no-brainer; what isn’t is tweaking something that’s not broken, but could be improved upon. Changing a word here or there to make a good paragraph great, or a great paragraph incredible.

Sound exhausting? You’d better believe it is. But that, in my opinion, is what separates writers stuck in neutral with those who get noticeably better, book after book after book. The latter sweat the small stuff. They bite the bullet and do a third, or a fourth, or a fifth rewrite on something that may be perfectly fine as it is, but could be better. They refuse to settle for anything less than the best work they’re capable of producing, every time out of the box, no matter how much that impacts their rate of output.

Which brings me to:

3. They turn a blind eye to the clock.

The biggest problem with refusing to publish anything but your best possible work is that all that rewriting eats up time. Some authors can produce their best stuff in the blink of an eye, but most of us can’t. Most of us have to beat a story or novel to death, word by word, before we can find that magic draft that represents everything we’ve got to give, and that means we have very little hope of ever being described as “prolific.”

Some writers fail to get perceptibly better over time not because they lack the skills to do so, but because they move too fast to fully utilize them. Either too sick of their present work-in-progress to rewrite another word of it, or too focused on the quantity of their writing to pay the proper respect to its quality, some writers leap from one project to the next without taking the time necessary to make any of them a real gem. I see it time and time again. Talented men and women who exhibit the potential to write fantastic stuff, but whose work cries out for just one more pass beneath an editor’s critical blue pencil.

And now that I’ve mentioned the word “editor,” here are two more things writers do to get better:

4. They learn to know the difference between “good” and “great.”

and

5. They view criticism objectively, and treat it as an opportunity to identify the weaknesses in their work.

Sad to say, but some writers simply lack the perspective to see what others can: that their writing is less than perfect. They don’t get better because they’re unaware that such a possibility exists, so the flaws in their work follow doggedly after them, book after book after book. These people aren’t conceited, they’re just oblivious.

On the other hand, there are also those who fail to see the imperfections in their work because they refuse to see them. They’ve convinced themselves that they’ve already achieved greatness, and anyone who suggests otherwise simply doesn’t “get” what they do. If they would only read the negative reviews they receive with an open mind, they might gain some insight into how their stuff could be improved upon and do something about it. But they don’t. Instead, they chuck every negative review into the Just One Person’s Opinion file and miss out on learning something valuable from the experience. They equate criticism with cluelessness or, worse, a personal attack that has no basis in fact.

Finally:

6. They don’t let their good reviews go to their head.

When somebody at The New York Times, or Washington Post, or People magazine, raves about your latest book as if Raymond Chandler himself must have risen from the grave to write it, or dares to compare you to Michael Connelly at the height of his powers, it can be easy to think you’ve arrived. But people who write book reviews are biased and human like all the rest of us, so their likes and dislikes should never be confused with the Voice of God. Writers committed to getting better find encouragement in the praise some reviewers heap upon them, but they don’t interpret such praise to mean their work has suddenly become the gold standard by which that of all others must be measured. The motivation to improve doesn’t come from overconfidence, it comes from humility. A willingness to consider the possibility that, despite what that nice book reviewer at Publisher’s Weekly wrote about you back in 2006, you haven’t quite reached the mountain top yet, and you’ve got a lot more work to do before you get there.

Oh, wait. I almost forgot this last one:

7. They don’t look to their friends or peers for validation.

Back when I was just a wee lad, writing awful short stories on a manual typewriter in my mother’s kitchen, I used to show all my stuff to my beloved Aunt Hazel, who was and remains a big mystery buff. And you’re not going to believe this, I know, but she always loved it. Every story, every word. For a long while, I thought this meant that all those professional editors who kept rejecting my work had to be out of their minds. And then one day, a light went on over my head and I realized something:

She’s my Aunt Hazel. Of course she’s gonna tell me how great my writing is!

Now, most writers don’t have an Aunt Hazel, but we all have friends and homeboys, some of them authors just like ourselves, and the reason these people are our friends is, they like us and care about us. They’ve got our back. They don’t want to see us fail, and would never do anything to hurt us. So when we ask for their opinion of something we’ve shed blood, sweat and tears to create, something we’ve already sent off to our publisher thinking it’s another flawless masterpiece — but it isn’t. . . What do they do?

They lie to us, of course. Just like my Aunt Hazel.

Oh, sure, your literary brothers-in-arms might offer you a word of criticism here or there. But they’re not going to do anything to disabuse you of the notion that this book was even better than your last, because they’re counting on you to fluff their feathers similarly when the shoe’s on the other foot. Honest, straightforward criticism of your work is something best left to people who have nothing to lose by offering it; readers and reviewers who don’t know you, and so have no fear of hurting your feelings by assessing your work in a less than glowing manner.

In other words, writing buddies are good for buying the next round at the convention bar, not for judging your stuff with anything approaching real objectivity.

In closing . . .

My friend at the Holiday party? When I mentioned Bullet-Point #1 above — specifically the part about tossing whole chunks of a book in the can when our conscience says we must — she was aghast.

“But two-hundred pages? I can’t just throw out two-hundred pages and start over again!”

And I thought, of course you can’t.

Unless you want to get better.

You probably saw the online notices about this: A beautiful young thing ingeniously quits her job by writing her resignation notice to an insufferable boss in 33 parts on a white board.

Yeah, right.

Well, here’s what I think about all the knuckleheads out there who didn’t catch the whiff of a publicity stunt coming off these images a mile away. My apologies to thechive.com, if any are actually warranted.

Enjoy!

Several years ago, my bud Robert Ward, a brilliant crime writer in his own right, was one of the subjects of a brief Q & A series the Los Angeles Times used to do with local authors, and one of the things he was asked about, somewhat predictably, was what he was reading at the moment.

As I remember it, Bob named two or three books, all by very fine authors who just so happened to be both famous and dead. He was entirely within his rights to do so, of course, and I’m sure he was just giving the Times an honest answer to their question, but the next time I saw Bob, I gave him some good-natured hell about his choices, along the lines of, “Hemingway? Really? Hemingway’s dead, Bob, he doesn’t need the free pub.”

Which, needless to say, was my not-so-subtle way of suggesting that a writer like myself — critically well received, struggling to build a readership, and still among the goddamn living! — could have used the mention in the Times far more than old Uncle Ernie did.

I wasn’t really serious, because only a raving egomaniac could have been. But I’ve since come to realize that the point I was making for the sake of levity was not an entirely invalid one. When an author is given an opportunity to show some public love for another author, should he not make a concerted effort to choose a deserving party who could actually benefit from the nod, rather than someone who is beyond giving a damn because they are either six feet underground or already a household name?

If I’ve learned anything in the twenty-plus years I’ve been a published author, it’s that the best publicity is free publicity, and free publicity — especially the positive kind — is hard as hell to come by. The value of having a bestselling author (Michael Connelly, Janet Evanovich, Harlan Coben, etc.) drop your name in a radio interview or newspaper article may be debatable, but I think we can all agree that such shout-outs in the media sure as hell can’t hurt.

All of this has been on my mind lately because Jen Forbus, the brilliant and lovely mastermind behind the exceptional book blog, Jen’s Book Thoughts, routinely posts photos of her favorite authors caught in the act of reading, and she’s recently asked me to take part in the fun. I haven’t yet gotten around to posing for a picture, let alone sending her one, and this is primarily because I can’t quite decide which book I want to be seen reading.

It would be a simple matter to flash the latest title by one of my favorite writers — Martin Cruz Smith, Donna Leon, Robert Crais — which is precisely what I suspect most of the authors already pictured on Jen’s site decided to do when they were asked to submit a photo. But it’s occurred to me that going with a New York Times bestselling author would be a missed opportunity to provide someone who isn’t one — a relative unknown with mad talent whom I’d like to see find the larger readership he or she richly deserves — with a little free press.

Granted, no photo of Gar Anthony Haywood with his nose in their book is going to make or break anyone’s career, no matter where it’s posted. But it could make a reader or two aware of an author they’d never heard of before and send them off to the nearest bookstore in search of that author’s work. Cover blurbs sometimes affect people that way, don’t they?

Aside from whatever promotional value can be found in such photographic endorsements, there’s something else to consider: The ego boost to the author whose work is being touted. Or am I the only writer in the world who gets the warm-and-fuzzies from such tiny moments of recognition? (If I were to read in Essence magazine tomorrow, for instance, that Halle Berry is a big fan, I would keel over dead with a smile on my face a friggin’ army of morticians would not be able to pry from my lips. Hey, I can dream, can’t I?)

It isn’t often that we mid-list writers get the chance to offer our opinion on things for the benefit of a wide audience; nobody much cares enough to ask what we think about anything. So when the opportunity presents itself, I think it’s incumbent upon us to make the very most of it, which is to say, in a manner that could do somebody other than ourselves a little good. This is why, when I finally do get around to sending Jen Forbus a photo for her site, the book you’ll see me holding in it won’t be there just to demonstrate how steeped in the classics (OF MICE AND MEN), brainy (A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME), or up on the latest Big Thing (THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO) I am. It’ll be a book written by an author whom I firmly believe kicks ass and warrants your attention.

And who, not incidentally, is neither deceased nor too successful to appreciate the gesture.

I did something this past weekend I really didn’t want to do: I watched the movie Precious. Lord knows I tried to avoid it; critical acclaim or no, any film about a poor, obese, teenage black girl growing up as the live-in slave of an equally obese, abusive, welfare-queen mother had to be the cinematic equivalent of root canal surgery, right? Why would I ever want to subject myself to that kind of misery?

Well, surprise, surprise — the film was brilliant. Well written, smartly directed, and performed by a cast of actors deserving of every accolade and award nomination it received. In short, I’m glad I saw the movie.

But yeah, sitting through it was a living nightmare.

In part because its subject matter was cringe-inducing, yes, but mostly because it was real. The people who made this film — and I would assume this is also true of Sapphire, the author of the book upon which the film was based — didn’t pull any punches. Hell, no. They took a story dealing with some incredibly sordid characters and situations and presented them in all their horrific, obscene, and gut-wrenching glory. It could be argued that the language in Precious alone should have earned it an NC-17 rating. I mean, nothing Linda Blair ever regurgitated in The Exorcist comes close to the bile that comes out of the mouth of Precious’s mother, in particular, throughout the course of this film.

And all for only one reason that I can imagine: authenticity. A commitment to depict these people exactly as they would appear in the real world, grotesque warts and all. Choosing to hew this close to the ugly truth could not have been an easy decision; the filmmakers had to know that doing so would cost them a sizable part of the crossover audience movie studios so covet. Yet they held to their convictions and did it anyway, trusting that the quality of the film would win out over the criticisms it was bound to receive for its almost unrelenting darkness and vulgarity.

So what does any of this have to do with crime writing, you ask?

Well, only days before popping Precious into the ol’ DVD player, I finished reading my first Richard Stark (aka Donald E. Westlake) novel, THE HUNTER. Following my reading of James Crumley’s THE LAST GOOD KISS, this was Step Two in my ongoing effort to finally read masters of the mystery/crime/espionage genres I should have read a long time ago (Ian Fleming, George V. Higgins, Rex Stout, etc.). I had a particular interest in THE HUNTER — one of a series of books Stark wrote about a ruthless professional thief simply named “Parker” — because it served as the basis for one of my all-time favorite movies, 1967’s Point Blank, starring Lee Marvin. In the film, Parker (renamed “Walker” for some odd reason) is a single-minded, sociopathic killer relentlessly blasting his way through the Mob in order to get somebody, anybody to pay him the $93,000 they owe him. Walker is also driven by revenge — his former partner double-crossed him, stole his wife, and left him for dead in the aftermath of a heist, then used Walker’s share of the take to buy his way back into the Mob’s good graces — but his primary interest is recovering his money. Because it’s his money, he earned it, and he wants it back, goddamnit!: $93,000, not a penny more and not a penny less.

You’ve gotta love that kind of manic tunnel vision.

(Of course, were the film remade today [as it was earlier in the form of the 1994 Mel Gibson stinker, Payback], Walker would find his motivation in the fact that his backstabbing partner, who raped and killed Walker’s parents and kid sister fifteen years before, is now holding his wife and two children hostage in an impenetrable Mob fortress guarded by an army of ex-Special Ops psychopaths blah-blah-blah-blah-blah…)

I’d been warned by fans of Stark/Westlake that Point Blank’s Walker, as cold and violent as he was, paled by comparison to THE HUNTER’s Parker, so I was prepared to meet a somewhat less likable protagonist. But damn! Parker makes Walker look like a Salvation Army Santa Claus. It isn’t so much that the body count in THE HUNTER is higher than it is in Point Blank, it’s the ease with which Parker adds to it that makes for such a jarring contrast. Parker may only kill those who “need” killing in THE HUNTER, but it doesn’t take much in his estimation for someone to meet that qualification. Simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or knowing something he doesn’t want getting around, is enough to make you better dead than alive in his book. And remorse? Forget about it. That’s for relative softies like Darth Vader to fret over.

What I’m describing, of course, is the archetypical noir protagonist: a deeply flawed, self-serving lead character who’s usually surrounded by a supporting cast cut from the same nasty cloth. Altar boys and Girl Scouts need not apply. To write fiction deserving of the “noir” designation, an author has to accept the fact that his work will probably turn off a lot more potential readers than it turns on. He has to write about unpleasant people doing terrible things to innocents and scumbags alike, without remorse or regret, and to do it realistically, he has to show little or no regard for the reactions of his reader. I call this “going there,” “there” being a place not everyone will care to visit, and I think embarking upon this journey is one of the most courageous moves any writer can ever make.

Because going there is entirely counter-intuitive to what we authors are hardwired to do from Day One: seek a wide, all-encompassing readership. Deliberately choosing to write the kind of book you know going in will have only a limited appeal, and then writing that book as faithfully to the form as possible (which is to say, without artificially toning things down to soften the blow), is gutsy as hell, and not every writer has the cojones to do it.

Most only have enough to do the job halfway, at best. These people write, either consciously or subconsciously, what I like to call “Noir Lite”: novels that feature noirish characters and situations, but none of the hair-raising dialogue or on-screen violence that should naturally follow. The latter elements have been either sanitized or, worse, excised altogether, to better reduce the author’s chances of offending those readers for whom “noir” is a dirty word. This, to me, is a joke. A kinder, gentler noir? There ain’t no such thing.

Which is why I’ve actively avoided trying to write a legitimate noir novel to date. I don’t want to go there. I’ve got no problem writing dialogue that could peel paint off a wall, or describing certain acts of violence in gruesome detail, but I don’t want to write stories in which the good guys are, to all extents and purposes, completely indistinguishable from the bad, and can only end on a definite downer, as all true noir stories must. It’s just not my thing.

Neither is faking it.

To write noir, you have to do what the people behind Precious did: You have to go there. Not part way, not halfway, but all the way to that dark, funky, foul-smelling place in which noir resides. Some readers won’t be able to stand the stench of your kitchen, but those are the breaks.

As I’m sure Parker would say were he around to ask for an opinion: “Deal with it.”

I admit it: All of the eleven books and numerous short stories I’ve written and published so far can only really be classified as “crime fiction.” For the most part, crime and mystery is what I grew up reading, so it’s only natural that this is what I most enjoy writing. By any honest definition, I’m a “genre” writer.

Many people in my profession would say I should treat this fact like a dirty little secret. Or, at the very least, I should be discreet about it. Because the word “genre” kills. It kills credibility, it kills book sales, it kills any chance a writer might have of winning the most prestigious literary awards. To some folks, “genre” is just shorthand for “brain candy,” and no amount of reasonable argument on your part will ever change their minds.

Because, let’s face it, a lot of genre fiction is crap. There, I’ve said it.

Ironically, though, I don’t think it’s the general quality of genre writing that haters find so objectionable. It’s the mere fact that genre fiction seeks to entertain more then anything else. The genre author’s great crime is a lack of ambition; we don’t aim high enough. If we were really trying, if we held our art in the proper esteem, we wouldn’t much give a damn how much “fun” our work is to read. What we’d care about is how deeply affected it leaves every reader, how much effort it takes to absorb and properly comprehend. “Real” fiction doesn’t go down easy; it burns and catches in the throat, then sits at the bottom of the belly where, over time, it can be fully digested.

Needless to say, this is a very myopic viewpoint that lumps immensely talented writers like James Lee Burke and Martin Cruz Smith into the same gene pool as Grandy Pike, Jr., author of the Pioneer Spring Water Delivery Guy mystery series, and C.C. Hurpington, the writer behind the Optometrists of America’s Cornea Award-winning thriller, EYE THE JURY. It’s a ludicrous generalization that does insult to the many great writers whose work within genre could easily measure up to that of most authors working outside of it. It’s like saying Count Basie and Lawrence Welk were equally insignificant because they were both just bandleaders.

Still, for the purposes of this post, I’m going to humor those who think there’s a concrete difference between genre fiction and non-genre fiction and concede the point, at least to this extent: As a general rule, genre fiction does indeed tend to be less emotionally wieldy than literary fiction. It reads faster and ends on a more satisfactory note (which is to say, it doesn’t leave the reader seeking out the nearest bridge from which to take a suicidal leap).

So given the above, you’d think that, if genre fiction were to get its fair share of media props anywhere, it would be on the annual “Summer Reading” lists that fans, reviewers and bloggers like to compile at this time of year. Isn’t summer the time for deck chairs, fruity mixed drinks and long naps in the shade? For escaping from all of one’s troubles to pretend, just for a week or two, that all is right with the world? If you can’t dispense with the need for everything you read to be intellectually demanding and edifying in the summer, when can you?

Well, it seems that some literary experts can’t bring themselves to stoop all the way down to genre level even for the brief respite from mainstream fiction that summer vacations offer. I’ve just taken a gander at NPR’s 15 Soaring Summer Reads, compiled by three independent booksellers, no less, and there is nothing remotely resembling a bonafide genre title on the list. The intro pretty much explains the snub:

As days get longer and the sun’s rays get stronger, books that are lighter and brighter stand a better chance of squeezing into packed beach bags and suitcases. But that doesn’t mean summer books need to be weightless.

Ah-ha. Did you get that? It’s okay to celebrate summer by lowering your reading standards to the “lighter” and “brighter” levels, but that “weightless” stuff publishers’ catalogs actually refer to openly as “mysteries” and “thrillers”? Surely there’s no need to take things that far.

It’s a crying shame. Because it’s readers who lose out when booksellers and reviewers blow golden opportunities like this one to relieve them of the misconception that any book centered around a fictional crime can’t possibly be worth their time.

Even during the summer, when they’ve been given a free pass to simply enjoy the act of reading for a change.

It’s an annual rite of spring: The winners of the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar awards are announced, and all the whining, crying, and second-guessing begins. Readers and fans alike debate ad nauseum the worthiness of the winners, the sanity of the award judges, and the fairness of the selection process. Some claim the results were just, others insist they were a travesty. Accusations of bias and conspiracy run rampant.

Usually, I’m just as happy as the next guy to take part in the festivities. Exposing as in idiot someone who thinks Book A was more deserving of an Edgar (or Shamus, or Hammett, or L.A. Times Book Prize, or…) than Book B is a kind of fun you just can’t have doing anything else.

But this year, rather than partake in the same, old argument that can never be won — people are gonna love what they love and hate what they hate, no matter how irrational you make them feel about it — I thought I’d ask a simple question instead: What does winning an award like the Edgar for Best Novel really mean?

Obviously, the organization behind the award would like it to mean that the winning book is the most exceptional of its kind written within a 12-month period. A panel of judges qualified to make such a determination have read a representative sampling of all such books published that year and found this one to be better than all the rest.

Okay. So far, so good.

But how do judges define the word “better”?

That subjectivity always plays a hand in the voting process, no matter what writers’ organization or guidelines are involved, should go without saying. And anybody who would either deny this is true, or lose a great deal of sleep over it, isn’t playing with a full deck. Judges are human beings; human beings have their biases. Asking someone to read dozens of books and then choose a mere handful of the best without regard for their own personal tastes is like asking them to judge a beauty contest without taking their own ideas about what beauty is into account. It can’t really be done.

Is that in itself a problem? Generally speaking, I’d say no. An award panel’s biases should only be an issue when they aren’t diverse enough to balance each other out. Put nothing but cozy lovers on a panel, or three thriller fans and one hardboiled one, etc., and you create a rigged game almost certain to give short shrift to a whole slew of worthy books. But mix it up a little, take pains to ensure that an awards committee consists of judges of varied sub-genre stripes, and you’re more than likely going to get a fair outcome. Not every time, mind you, but most of the time.

I’m sure all of this is stuff you already know, and there isn’t much to be gained by my writing, or your reading, a blog post about it. The thing I’m most interested in examining today is, accepting the fact that personal bias is a natural and relatively benign byproduct of the voting process, what kind of book in these popularity contests usually takes home the prize? One that adheres to the time-honored conventions of the genre or sub-genre involved, to the extent that it represents a virtually flawless example of it? Or one in which the quality of the writing (as opposed to plot, character, satisfactory puzzle and denouement, etc.) is so extraordinary, it trumps all, even at the expense of those aforementioned conventions?

My answer: the former.

While I’m sure every judge on every awards committee starts out hoping to find a book that strikes a perfect balance between great writing and a masterful command of those things that make a mystery a mystery, or a thriller a thriller, or — I think such a balance is rare, indeed. So in the absence of it, judges end up weighing one strength over the other to select their winner: superior writing over homage to form, or vice versa. As a result, what an Edgar/Shamus/Hammett/Whatever award actually says about a book is constantly changing. Sometimes it means one thing, and sometimes it means something else.

It’s probably unrealistic to think that this inconsistency is avoidable, but if we were to pretend for a moment that it is, what statement should readers expect an award to make about a book every time it is handed out: That it’s brilliantly written, or that it hits the sweet-spot of the applicable genre?

I’m not sure I know the answer myself. But I think it’s dependent upon how comfortable one is with the idea that, in the end, a private eye novel (for example), if true to the form, is just an entertainment, and anyone who tries to make it something bigger than that is overreaching for no good purpose. Hence, it’s okay for the Shamus to be given to a book that any fan of the P.I. genre would find exceptional, but would do little or nothing to impress someone who ordinarily never reads the stuff.

Personally, I have always felt that sub-standard writing should disqualify a book from winning any “best of the year” award, no matter how entertaining it is. We call what we do “writing,” not “storytelling,” so the “best” of what we do should offer a reader the whole enchilada: great story, involving characters, and above-average writing.

Given the choice between a book that nails the demands of its genre down cold but reads like a first draft, and one that plays loosely with those demands but leaves you wishing to God you could use language that way, I’ll take the latter every time.

And vote that book a winner.

Observation: I came across this on an otherwise great, writer’s blog:

Reaction: Blog spam is wrong. Very, very wrong. (My condolences to all authors involved.)

As an earlier post of mine would clearly suggest, I’ve got a real problem with authors who saddle their books with lame, over-used, on-the-nose titles. Calling a book about an ex-con trying to stay straight THE PAROLEE, for example, demonstrates about as much imagination and creativity to me as a rock. I don’t get it.

But there’s one thing an author can do that I think is even more incomprehensibly banal: Choose a plot we’ve all seen a gazillion times before.

You know the ones I mean. Rogue cop is targeted by serial killer he’s chasing. Devastated mother’s kidnapped child reappears 15 years later — maybe. Drunken P.I. is framed for murder by bogus female client. Killing machine trained by the C.I.A. gets caught in a deadly double-cross.

Please. Enough already.

I bring this up now because I just read an interview with a “bestselling” mystery-romance novelist whose latest book is about a woman married to the man of her dreams whose idyllic life is completely shattered when her husband abruptly disappears and she discovers, much to her astonishment, that…

Repeat after me, everyone:

…he wasn’t the man she thought he was.

Whoa. Someone had their thinking cap on when they came up with that one, didn’t they?

Look, I understand that there is a finite number of plots in the world to choose from; the British journalist and author Christopher Booker, in fact, claims there are only seven. But however many there are at this stage in the history of human letters — seven or seven million — it’s for damn sure there at least five we don’t ever, ever need to see again, in any form, and the lady-with-a-missing-husband-discovers-she’s-been-married-to-a-stranger has got to be one of them. Sheesh.

Assuming the author in question hasn’t been writing while under a rock for the last 25 years, she must have known how many others have trampled across her chosen path before she even started in. So my question is, Why in God’s name did she go there?

“To put her own spin on it,” some might say in her defense. “To infuse it with new life by taking it in a different and totally unique direction.”

Which I’m sure is probably true, at least in part. And she might have even succeeded on some level. But unless she turned the entire premise upside down, what she ended up with almost certainly has to be LWAMHDSBMTAS mystery-romance novel #464, and I for one think that’s about 454 too many of the damn things.

To be fair, I’m definitely in the minority here. People keep writing books based on the PLOTS OF THE LIVING DEAD because people keep reading them, apparently nowhere near as hung up on the importance of original thought as I am. But Jesus, I sure wish they’d stop. Some of these premises are so old and ripe they emit a foul stench you can smell just by reading a book’s description on Amazon. They are the book equivalent of zombies, rising from the grave again and again to dine on the brain matter of readers too dim-witted to run, lock themselves inside their homes, and read something that’s only been attempted twice before, for a change.

Where the hell is Woody Harrelson when you need him?

As you might imagine, this isn’t the only writer’s blog I regularly visit. I have a daily routine of checking in with several others that I find particularly smart and stimulating. So naturally, I’ve come across a lot of things posted by other writers that have struck me as particularly brave and/or illuminating. Confessions, of sorts, that all is not as rosy as their book advances and cheerful publicity photos might lead one to believe.

Most of the time, these things are written to be intentionally revealing; the writer is deliberately opening his- or herself up to give us a glimpse into what sad/funny/scary stuff lies under the hood. But that isn’t always the case. Sometimes, a writer gives us that glimpse without actually intending to. He writes something meant to be innocent that exposes a lot more bone than skin.

I think I read something like that recently.

I won’t say who or where, but Writer A was commenting on Writer B’s post on the subject of full-time day jobs, and how having to return to one for survival makes an author feel like an unmitigated loser. In the course of commiserating, Writer A wrote something to this effect:

“If you depend on publishing for your livelihood, you have to go where the money is, even if you don’t want to. God knows I don’t write entirely for myself. I want people to read my books. I’d prefer to make some money at it.”

Now, this isn’t headline news, I know. Writers have been following the money just to stay in print for as long as we’ve been putting quills to paper. I’m no exception. But this was a fairly well established, mid-list author with brand name recognition talking here, admitting that he (she) doesn’t write what he wants to write because he can’t make a decent living that way.

Damn. Has it really come to that?

The idea that nobody who’s being paid well in this business is writing exactly what he wants is terrifying to me. Aspiring writers are advised all the time not to write with the market in mind, because that will only distract them from the real task at hand, which is writing the best book they can possibly write. And yet the truth is, published authors five, six, a dozen well-received books into their careers are continuing to do precisely that, tailoring what they write to conform to what they know — or hope —will sell.

It’s crazy. And it’s counterproductive. And it sure as hell isn’t fair that the state of publishing today has so many of us thinking that we have no other choice but to go there.

Me? Been there, done that, ain’t going back.

I’ve been in this game for a while now. I’d say, of the eleven books I’ve published to this point, two were written more with an eye on what I thought would sell than my own personal inclinations. The rest? I wrote them because I wanted to write them, the way I wanted to write them.

And I’m dead broke. (How’s that for a glimpse into what scary stuff lies under the hood?)

Trouble is, I don’t know how else to operate. If I wrote professionally only because I can, maybe I wouldn’t care what kind of compromises I’d have to make in order to keep the checks coming in. But I write professionally because I need to, and that need is all about the stories I feel compelled to tell, not the bills I’m obligated to pay. If I ever make it big as a novelist, it won’t be because I write one hell of a great Harlan Coben clone; it’ll be because I have a voice unlike anyone else’s, and people in large numbers have decided they like it. Trying to shape that voice into a form the market will bear would only distort it and render it less distinctive.

In any case, the long-term dream for me has never been as simple as to make a living writing; that’s not a dream, it’s an ambition. The dream has always been to someday have it both ways: to write exactly what I want to write, each and every time out of the box, and make a damn good living doing it. Evidence to date would suggest I’m just kidding myself, but that’s okay. Hope springs eternal.

The moral to all this? As Writer A suggested, don’t depend on publishing for your livelihood if you want to write for yourself and yourself alone. Find yourself that accursed day job, write exactly what you want to write in your copious spare time, and wait for the world to both catch on to your genius and reward you accordingly.

Otherwise, it seems to me, you might just as well be a factory worker making widgets for the Man.

Among the books I packed for our most recent family vacation (ten days in Livingston, Montana — highly recommended!), was a classic hardboiled novel I’d somehow never gotten around to reading: James Crumley’s THE LAST GOOD KISS. I’d heard the late Crumley, and this book specifically, mentioned in glowing terms by so many crime novelists I admire, I’d lost count, so I was really looking forward to a dynamite read.

I wasn’t particularly disappointed. THE LAST GOOD KISS turned out to be a rip-roaring yarn in the classic P.I. tradition: action-packed, atmospheric, and brimming with memorable, larger-than-life characters. It’s a modern Western travelogue full of sex, violence, and humor, and at turns, it’s as beautifully written as anything I’ve ever read.

But one thing it most definitely isn’t is believable. Not for a single moment.

Which of course, many people would say is okay, because where is it written that a private eye novel can’t be farcical?

The thing is, I’m not so sure farce was Crumley’s intent. I think THE LAST GOOD KISS was meant to be a fun ride, yes, but not a laughable one. And yet I couldn’t take it seriously for a minute. Crumley simply wouldn’t allow it. He had the snappy dialogue, hot babes in heat and endearing irascibility of his protagonist, C.W. Sughrue, cranked up so high, nothing resembling reality could be viewed through the haze for more than a few seconds at a time.

Take Crumley’s dialogue, for instance. It was as if Sughrue and cast were competing for cash and prizes to see who could dazzle the reader with more clever witticisms and sarcastic comebacks. Snide rejoinders were piled on top of each other like hotcakes on a plate; one was never enough. If somebody called Sughrue an ornery old cuss, you could bet he’d say something like, “And I’ll be an even bigger one tomorrow,” rather than just nod his head knowingly and leave it at that.

As for Sughrue himself, in the course of THE LAST GOOD KISS, he had to fend off the advances of more beautiful women than Tom Cruise at the Playboy Mansion. They kept coming at him in waves, and try as he might to resist, being the ethical professional that he was, a man only has so much will power, so…

And, Jesus Christ!, I have never, ever read a book of any kind in which so much alcohol was consumed so nonchalantly by so many. It seemed like Sughrue and his friends were popping the tab on a can or passing a fifth every time they entered a room. Didn’t matter who was involved — I could swear that every conversation between two or more people started with the words, “Sure thing, but first, hand me one of them beers!” Granted, functional alcoholism is nothing new in hardboiled crime fiction, but the way Crumley dealt with the subject, you’d think being inebriated every minute of every day involved all the emotional consequence of chewing sugared gum.

And still, having said all of the above, I genuinely enjoyed the book.

What bothers me is, I can’t help but see the novel as a missed opportunity for Crumley, who was clearly a writer of great power. More than one reviewer over the years has called THE LAST GOOD KISS nothing less than “the best private eye novel ever written,” but I think that’s merely what it could have been, had Crumley shown a greater regard — or any regard, really — for realism. And plots that do more than circle back upon themselves, over and over again. Whatever the best private eye novel ever written really is — and that’s a debate for another day — I have to believe it’s a much deeper read than THE LAST GOOD KISS, and that its author did a better job of balancing pathos with the absurd.

So yeah, THE LAST GOOD KISS, as people like to say in book blog circles, turned out to be “not my cuppa.” And that got me to thinking: Why not? How is it that I wasn’t more impressed by Crumley’s approach to the P.I. novel, as so many of my peers have been — some even to the point of writing just like him?

Answer: I never read Crumley during my formative years as a writer, when the things I find problematic about THE LAST GOOD KISS today may not have even registered on my radar screen. Early on, I think I could have easily been smitten by the laugh out loud, written by the seat of his pants entertainment quotient of Crumley’s book, because things like credibility and verisimilitude didn’t much matter to me yet. Back then, my only ambition as a writer was to show the reader a good time, so I would have likely found THE LAST GOOD KISS Lesson One in a class on how to do it.

But I wasn’t reading Crumley in those days. Instead, I was reading people like Lawrence Block and Ross MacDonald; John D. McDonald, Raymond Chandler and Jonathan Valin. Authors who showed little or none of the interest in super-sized fantasy that Crumley appears to have exulted in. Block, in particular, took pains to scale everything in his stories back — character, dialogue, sex — to keep all within the realm of the genuinely possible, doling out humor, in particular, in doses Crumley would have no doubt considered miserly. Block’s was a style of writing within genre I found most involving from a reader’s perspective, and most challenging from a writer’s, and so it was Block whom I ultimately chose to emulate — as I continue to do today. (I’ve yet to reach the Grand Master’s level, of course, and indeed, I never may. But Block’s stuff is still my target, and I’ve got no problem admitting it.)

What would have happened had I read James Crumley back in the day instead of Lawrence Block? There’s no way to know for sure. Maybe FEAR OF THE DARK, my first novel, would have sounded a lot more like THE LAST GOOD KISS than EIGHT MILLION WAYS TO DIE. And maybe I would have been more than okay with that.

But as it is, I’m happy my influences were who they were, and that I write the way I do as a result. No offense to James Crumley, but I’d just as soon let someone else write the next THE LAST GOOD KISS.