Nikitas Terzis: Synthesis of a Thriller

SYNTHESIS OF A THRILLER

The Writing of Bird of Prey

Wed. Feb. 23 2011, 7.30 pm

INTRODUCTION

(a) Why does one write? Or let me ask a question I can answer: Why do I write?

Well, if I look back, I remember that in grade 3 I pretended to be sick one day, and after mom & dad left for work, I wrote a fairy-tale
Unconscious decision: it was fun to write

(b) Is there a procedure through which one can write a novel?

I think there is
I am no expert, I have only high-school English, and I have not attended a creative writing course
BUT I have written 5 novels, and through trial and error, I have developed a procedure that works

Logically, this procedure can work for any one. It consists of:

The Outline
The First Draft
The Second Draft
The Editing
The Unity
The Advance copy

Let's look at these elements one at a time:

1. The OUTLINE is the most important part of the procedure.

It sets-up the book in your mind, gives you direction while writing
If you've ever tried to write a novel and quit, the reason is you probably missed this step
In Bird of Prey (BoP), the outline took-up 40% of my time

Let's define novel & mystery-thriller

A novel tells a story. People make the story happen. They move in an environment.
The aspects of the novel are: Theme, conflict, resolution.
Novels are different from every day life in 2 ways (a) They have a plot & (b) boy & girl live happily ever after (see Aspects of the Novel by E. M. Forster)
In the novel the story is king, more so in America than in Europe
Survival is the chief human instinct, and what pushes us to survive is fear. Fear is the chief human emotion, and fear fuels the thriller. (BoP begins with: “Fear, like hunger is an instinct. It comes whether you like it or not.”)
Paraphrase: “mystery thriller” to “puzzling events that scare us”
The great-grandfather of the genre is Homer's Odyssey, the grandfather Edgar Alan Poe, the fathers John Buchan & Eric Ambler (who changed Lords to ordinary men; innocent man blamed for crime or in trouble). Other important writers (to me) are Ian Fleming & Alistair MacLean.
Purpose is to mystify & scare you, I must create mystery & fear

(a) Key words, or what will the novel be about?

Key words establish the setting, the characters & the plot.
Personal experiences: realistic, easier, fun. For BoP I chose:

ancient & modern Greece (I live here)
Archaeology (found archaeological sites interesting)
Mother-daughter antagonism (Wife-mother in law tel. conversations & conflict, to extreme: woman who tried to throw her mother off the balcony)
Surgeon (A friend who hates people yet saves their lives)
University life (experience academic staff & student at U of T)
Coins (Added later)

(b) The Novel's secret (or the answer to the mystery)

Surprising & believable, so you must know what it is to properly lead to it.

Stephen King: On Writing, says let the mystery be a mystery to the author as well, but King brings in the supernatural to bail him out
In BoP, The mystery is who stole the coins?
Answer is believable & Surprises because we tend to associate loss of things with greed

finite number of plots available, practically impossible to be original
In BoP I went with: Archaeological object is discovered & disappears, whodunit?, secret police decides to use finders as bait for illicit art dealers, some dealers get violent to bait, resolve

(d) Main Characters drive the story, and are developed with the story.

For conviction, characters need real counterparts

Each of us is entirely unique, real characters far too complex to understand or describe
In literature, like in science, we create abbreviated versions of reality (models) What we say, is necessary for the story.
Two types of characters: flat (or types or caricatures) and round. Flat=a single sentence (ie John is stingy). Round=complex, life-like.
It gets down to this: If a Character never surprises=flat. If it does not convince=flat pretending to be round. If it surprises in a believable way=round. The best round characters belong to Leo Tolstoy
Character relationships & interaction define characters. In BoP, I wanted to have the mother-daughter conflict & the surgeon who hates people (later combined)
Character development very slow in real life, but reader likes to see within the novel. In BoP we want to see the mother-daughter relationship amend, a womanizer commit to the girl he loves. If we want to discover how, Instant Analysis by D J Lieberman p. 104
Character diagram: a circle for each character, description inside, interconnecting lines describe character interaction. Character diagram sums up our characters & relationships
The secondary characters are developed on the go (draft)
Characters sometimes must be invented, risky but necessary. In BoP tried to meet a forger-failed, so I looked him up in: Character traits by L N Edelstein p. 112,113
Characters must be extreme to impress us, real John & Mary boring, need people to escape reality & zap-up our lives

(e) The Environment (Setting/Background) is medium where plot & characters move.

Extreme plot & characters need authentic environment to make story believable Must meet appropriate people & visit them at work. In BoP:

We have a valuable find, unearthed & stolen. Urn or statue = fictional & common. A rare, valuable coin was much better. Most valuable Greek coin in existence is the Athenian decadrachm, I obtained a copy for $50 from the US
Characters speak English in Greece, and should be connected to the international archaeological community. I am Canadian, so I contacted the Canadian Institute in Greece. Dr Tomlinson, gave me the e-mails of archaeologists, and I attended events like this one
e-mails led to a 4 hour lunch with Dr Mac Wallace, a well known numismatist, sadly no longer with us. Mac filled me in on archaeologists: their work, records, & places the hung-out
In CIG events I noted people & talked to them. In writing the book, I recalled them, but gave them imaginary personal lives. This is how Kate, Vanessa and Ed came to life. One particular woman inspired me for Dr Wroth. Is she someone you know? Of course not!
Mac & CIG events pointed me to the American school (Agora) & Brit/American school grounds for setting & more people for models
I was very fortunate to meet Patricia Felch, an ancient coin librarian, who worked at the agora. This lucky break took my novel to a higher level of realism and accuracy

(f) List of Scenes we would like to have in the novel, fear, mystery, romance, etc

Scenes can come first in outline, may determine plot & characters. (for example, Hitchcock told Ernest Lehman, screenwriter of North by Northwest: I want to tell a story that has two scenes: a chase across faces of Mt Rushmore and...)
must correlate to characters, storyline & environment
We pick stories we would like to tell.
People like different things, large variety of scenes, more interesting & likable by everyone
Real stories are best, convincing
Imaginary scenes can be fun, but need witnesses or for you to fake-live them
List of scenes updated as we write, order changed to match plot & characters

Here's my list of scenes for BoP, in the order they occur in the book. Note what each scene brings to the reader:

exam supervisor discovers a girl cheating, what is he to do? (fear)
boy meets girl on the Parthenon (romance)-imaginary
car rally from high-school, I substituted ancient sites (romantic, mystery & fun)
fear of being naked, naked man wondering -imaginary
My lab partner failed her father's course (fear)
coins disappear from our keeping (fear)
tennis match game more than a game (character)
love scene with differences in age, race or relationships (perplexing)
search, arrest & interrogation by counter intelligence agency (fear)
cemetery (terror)-imaginary but I reversed the horror film experience (sunny instead of stormy, flirting with beautiful girl instead of ugly individuals)
yacht scene (glamour)
talk with bad guy is very polite (fear behind the window)
night swim (terror)-imaginary (diving in sea at dark, ship's propeller, chase)
come to in hospital room (fear & relief)

(g) Point of view, omniscient or first person?

Omniscient (God tells) means complete & unlimited knowledge, it is the advantage of written word over movies: we can get into anyone's head. So where is the mystery?
First person more immediate, we as readers are out there with the characters
In mystery-thriller best to be victim, innocent man in trouble (mystery & fear)
In BoP main character woman, story told by man: professor-numismatist sounded perfect.
Problem: real professors are not Indiana Jones's, so action sequences had to be short

(h) Title: to find a title is an ongoing process, till the book is finished.

I called it “Book 5” to start
listed any title I thought of as interesting & kept asking others
Two finalists: Bird of Prey & The Lost Decadrachms. But book not just about Lost decadrachms but a person so I picked the former

We now have our key words, a secret, a basic plot, main characters, a list of scenes & a point of view. We are now ready to start writing.

2. In the FIRST DRAFT we literally live through the story & record it.

We go somewhere where we'll be ALONE and ISOLATED (Stephen King goes down to his basement, Ian Fleming to his seaside cottage in Jamaica, Eric Ambler to a hotel, Len Deighton bought an ocean view cottage in Portugal for the purpose but soon left it as unproductive & wrote his books in Public libraries.) Bottom line is whatever works
What works best for me is a sea-view bedroom on a Greek island I haven't been before. For BoP I went to Patmos, Nisiros, Kithira & Thasos.
We build up loneliness
I discover where I can eat, stack food in the fridge & look around for a day
I remove spelling & grammar checks on my laptop
I relive the scene with the characters I have thought about.
Writing must keep pace with thinking so I use dashes (when I don't know something), A, B, C for names, any word that comes to mind, adjectives for emotions.
It is time consuming when your writing falls behind the action occurring in your head because you must go back and rethink through the scene
On writing scenes (first 2/3 of the novel) keep taking wrong turns & go in unexpected places, give your chief characters a hard time (Even if it's not what you set out to do)
I write as long as I can, when I am hungry I eat, when I am sleepy I sleep. I lose track of time
I last about a week & produce about 50 typed pages, I can't do more & have fun. But this is my hobby, and I do it for fun. Professionals are fast: Alistair Maclean did each of his 28 books in 35 days (strictly for the money he said), Ian Fleming & Eric Ambler in 60 days)
I reread my first draft on my way home, once or twice & put it away. The more you read, the more perfect it gets, and it becomes impossible to correct
I don't write a first draft again till I go to another place, 6 months to a year later.

3. The SECOND DRAFT produces most of the actual book.

You need a quiet place, no isolation. Home is fine
Avoid changing basic structure of the first draft, it ruins emotions
Correct spelling & improve grammar
Use a thesaurus to find best words in each sentence
Improve dialogue, have it match characters
Replace dashes with descriptions, place names, details
Remove adjectives, show emotions by dialogue & body language (Definitive book of Body language by A Pease)
choose appropriate names for the characters
When you think it's perfect, stop & reread it again next morning. Then it will look bad, so re-correct
Second draft of the first 5 chapters (for me) is 30% of the total time spent on the book. It sets up the voice & the basic characters. When book is finished: first few chapters must be revised again
After mid-point: characters are like people I know, I know what they will say or do. Authors say “they ran away from me, I wanted them to do one thing & they did another”.
In the last third of book: first & second drafts almost identical
Last chapters: tie all loose ends, solve all mysteries
Character description: Avoid physical description, unless necessary to plot. Let the reader imagine what suits him. For example, Vanessa's description by her lover is (p. 65) “(I want) your elegant body under the stars”. Elegant can be tall, chubby, curly, dark...whatever the reader wants

4. EDITING is necessary because a person can't see own mistakes. Another eye spots things easily.

Edit single or few chapters at the time, change plot & characters before things settle

Find someone with social experience who reads & you trust, must keep your voice (not people looking for mistakes)
ACCEPT advice, esp if not sure

5. UNITY check makes sure things develop as they should & stay constant.

Print entire book, go away for a weekend, reread it with a critical eye:
Does a grey car in the beginning become a blue one later?
Characters: Do they talk & act uniformly?
Does the first scene each character appears in, establishes what he/she is like?
For example--Simon Drake: he notices someone cheating, doesn't turn her in (p. 15) so when he decides to extort money & give it away according to his principles (p. 238) we are not surprised
In my novel, one character appears flat pretending to be round to some people. But this character is a spy. Spies are liars & cheats, so you can't determine what they are. Would the spy be any good, if someone ignorant of his methods (as the numismatist-narrator is) could manage to spot him?

6. Like any other new product, our book must now be tested by more people than the original two (author & editor). This is what we call the ADVANCE copy.

Print say 10 copies & give to relevant people, who have an analytical mind (and could thus tell you what is wrong rather than that ...something is wrong)
People feel obliged to say nice things, but you need encouragement & mostly what is wrong, so say to them that in order to help you they must SAY what is wrong
Try answering people's objections in writing then ask yourself: Am I convincing? If not, make changes
If people like different parts of the book, great! Variety makes a book likable to everyone
When many readers don't like something, make changes
In BoP, a few people said the night swim scene was too long & detailed & lost the pace, I edited it to make it tight. A few people said they wanted boy & girl to end-up together (which brings us back to EM Forster) so I cropped the original ending
It's interesting that when people comment on my novels, they are also telling me something about themselves. People who write poetry, for example, always say that my characters aren't emotional. People who are editors note all the grammar details & minor complaints but miss the big picture of scenes & characters.

CONCLUSION

This was then, in some detail, the way I wrote Bird of Prey. I gave you this talk because I thought that it would be more interesting to expose exactly how the book was written, so that you may have a more accurate idea of what's involved in writing a novel.

I hope you enjoyed my talk -- and I hope you will enjoy my book.

I'll be happy to answer your questions, if I can.

Tabs

Synthesis of a Thriller