Lee Goldberg

Bestselling mystery writer Diane Mott Davidson told the Richmond Times Dispatch that she has an unusual method of staying in touch with her characters.  She writes letters to them… and they write back to her.

"The way that I get into the voice of Goldy is to write, ‘Tell me what happened when you went into the law firm and found the body.’ Then she writes  back. It just helps me immensely, I guess because I love to write letters
anyway.

She’s been keeping up with her characters this way since her first mystery, "Catering to Nobody" The latest, "Double Shot," has been on the New York Times’ best-seller list for three weeks. It’s the 12th in the series that features a  caterer as the amateur sleuth.

But don’t get the wrong idea about Diane’s letter writing: We’re not talking
about some kind of mystical channeling here. It’s simply the way she pays
attention to her characters and lets them lead the way through her books.

It’s also the way Diane, who went to boarding school in Charlottesville,
connects with her characters’ emotions. "You can’t manipulate that. I know as a
reader myself that if I feel manipulated, if a character just doesn’t ring true,
I’m not going to read the book.

"I want to get inside a character’s head, but I also want to get inside a
character’s heart. When I’m writing a book, I need to know: ‘What’s in your
heart? What are you feeling?’ A letter is such an intimate way to find out. It’s
even more intimate than talking to someone in person, I think. Because you’re
not looking at them, you can let your heart spill out.

"This will sound funny, but Goldy has even written me letters that say, ‘I
don’t want this in the book.’"

I’ve never heard of that novel-writing method before. It seems to me like she’s doing twice as much writing as necessary… but hey, whatever works. And it certainly has for her.

I wonder if she actually mails the letters back and forth, just to add that touch of realism to the experience…

A few days ago, in a post about Clive Cussler, I mentioned that I’d read a bestselling thriller that was riddled with cliches. I didn’t mention the name of the books because the author is a friend of mine.

So, on the heels of finishing that book, I picked a mystery off my shelf written by another friend of mine, a buddy who has many books to his credit, though he’s yet to crack the best seller lists (this is the first book of his, though, that I’ve read). I’m 200 pages into his latest book… and I am astonished by how lazy his writing is. These cliches appear on just one page…

• "He has a rap sheet as long as his arm."
• "When his father died, he went right off the deep end. It took him a while to get his act together. For the past few years, though, he’s managed to keep his nose clean."
• "He didn’t have a leg to stand on."
• "I should never have stuck my neck out."
• "He’s a real piece of work."(by the way, what does "he’s a piece of work" really mean? And is it that bad to be a real "piece of work" as opposed to just your run-of-the-mill, ordinary "piece of work?").

Like I said, this litany of cliches was on one page.  You can imagine what the rest of the book has been like. One cliche line after another, mostly in dialogue. It’s relentless.

This book was written by a friend of mine. I am tempted, as a friend, to point these cliches out to him and tell him he should really be more careful. 

Then again, this book was published and was a big success (if not a best seller). Who the hell am I to criticize him? He certainly didn’t ask for my advice. Am I being more of a friend by keeping my opinion to myself?

The Los Angeles Times today published a scathing review of the BLACK WIND, the latest Dirk Pitt novel. 

But Cussler’s prose is uniformly and relentlessly awful. Not just in the occasional howler ("You have an annoying proclivity for survival, Mr. Pitt, which is exceeded only by your irritating penchant for intrusion"), but sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, it’s hurried, sloppy, ungrammatical, clichéd.

We finish "Black Wind" with profound relief — that the world has been saved once again, and that we don’t have to read more.

I haven’t read a Dirk Pitt novel in years, but the following story point is enough to keep me from ever reading this one:

Cussler, assisted by his real son Dirk, is a good mechanical plotter. Every few chapters, he puts the Pitts or other good guys in seemingly hopeless predicaments — shot out of the sky in a helicopter, trapped in deep-sea wreckage with air running out, imprisoned in a sinking ship, tied to a platform under a rocket about to be launched — and dares us to guess how they’ll escape. Once, for the fun of it, he cheats. Dirk Junior and Summer, swimming a five-mile-wide river, chased by thugs in a speedboat, are rescued by a restored Chinese junk piloted by … Clive Cussler himself.

I hate it when real-life authors literally insert themselves into their fictional stories as characters… it’s very, very rare when an author can actually pull it off without making the reader cringe (I understand Stephen King manages to make it work in his latest book).

But this review also points out a pet peeve of mine… the rampant use of cliches in bestselling novels. Aren’t editors editing any more? I found the following cliches on just one page of a recent, bestselling thriller:

1. Let’s rock and roll.
2. They had all the bells and whistles.
3. He took one look at her and wanted to head for the hills.
4. We got down to the nitty-gritty.
5. Close but no cigar.
6. He entered the picture and swept me off my feet. He was my knight in shining armor.

How could any author write that last line, in particular, and not hit the delete key? One writer I know defends using cliches like those above by arguing "That’s how people talk."

To me, it’s just bad writing… and more and more of the most successful writers in the mystery-suspense field are doing it and that saddens me, particularly when it’s one of my favorite authors. Perhaps its the pressure of turning out a book a year that’s making them sloppy… or perhaps it’s hubris, getting so big they think they’re "beyond" editing any more. I don’t know. What’s your take?