Author Envy, or Damn, I Wish I’d Written That

Do you ever read a novel, a story, or even a sentence that wows you so much, you wish you’d written it? That’s author envy, and it’s what we’re going to talk about in this month’s post for the Insecure Writers Support Group blog hop.

In case you’re new here, the first Wednesday of every month is Insecure Writers Support Group day, on which we insecure writers share our doubts, fears, struggles, and triumphs. Our awesome March co-hosts are Diedre Knight, Tonya Drecker, Bish Denham, Olga Godim, and JQ Rose. We’re also given an optional question we can answer in our posts; this month’s question is: Have you ever read a line in novel or a clever plot twist that caused you to have author envy?

Well, yes. Yes, I have.

Great, this month’s post is done. See ya!

Just kidding.

I read widely. Old books, new books, red books, blue books… er, I mean across genres and time periods, so I find different authors and stories and lines to be jealous of–and for different reasons. I’ll share a few here.

Plot Twists I Wish I’d Written

This one’s easy. Jeffery Deaver is the best plot twister I’ve ever read. Even when I know he’s going to pull a big twist on me–because he always does–I still don’t see it coming. Yet when I look back, all the clues were there, and everything was set up perfectly.

You can pick just about anything he’s written to find an example–novels or short stories–but my all-time favorite is The Bone Collector, the first Lincoln Rhyme novel. The movie with Denzel Washington is great too.

I wanna learn how to twist like Deaver.

Writing style I wish I could master

Another easy one – Diana Gabaldon. That woman can layer a scene with emotion better than just about anybody. Description, imagery, sensory details, action, pacing, dialogue, cadence–all work together seamlessly to immerse the reader. And then break our hearts.

Her scenes are long, and you’d need to read one all the way through to really experience the magic she weaves. Someone posted the Jamie and Claire reunion scene from Voyager (3rd Outlander novel) on Facebook. It’s a wonderful example of her talent; you can read it here.

If you want a shorter example, here’s one I’ve shared on this blog before. It’s from an Outlander novella called The Space Between that tells the story of Michael Murray and Joan MacKimmie, Jamie Fraser’s nephew and stepdaughter. In this scene, Michael has just lost his wife, and he’s remembering a conversation he had with his brother Ian when their father was dying.

“That’s how ye do it,” his brother Ian had told him, as they leant together on the rail of their mother’s sheep pen, the winter’s wind cold on their faces, waiting for their da to find his way through dying. “Ye find a way to live for that one more minute. And then another. And another.” Ian had lost a wife, too, and knew.

He’d wiped his face—he could weep before Ian, while he couldn’t with his elder brother or the girls, certainly not in front of his mother—and asked, “And it gets better after a time, is that what ye’re telling me?” His brother had looked at him straight on, the quiet in his eyes showing through the outlandish Mohawk tattoos. “No,” he’d said softly. “But after a time, ye find ye’re in a different place than ye were. A different person than ye were. And then ye look about and see what’s there with ye. Ye’ll maybe find a use for yourself. That helps.”

Diana Gabaldon, “The Space Between”

Most of this passage is dialogue–remembered dialogue at that–but there’s a bit of sensory setting detail, a smidge of internal monologue, and even a bit of character description and backstory. Every word, every detail, carries emotional weight, and many do double, even triple duty.

This passage puts a lump in my throat every time I read it. Damn, I wish I’d written it.

Opening line I wish I’d written

I struggle with opening lines so much. I’ve about given up trying to make them elegant. I’m now settling for serviceable. If you’re bored, Google great opening lines and see how the masters do it. Here’s my current favorite:

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

Stephen King, The Gunslinger

Instant curiosity: Who’s the man in black? Why is he fleeing? Who’s the gunslinger? Why is he following?

Instant tension: Fleeing implies danger, following implies stalking, and a desert is, by definition, a hostile environment.

Cadence and elegance: Read it aloud. It flows like liquid poetry.

Damn, I wish I’d written it.

Short story talent I wish I had

This one’s harder, because so many amazing short stories have been written over the years, but I’ll go with Stephen King again. His work can be uneven, but when he’s on, he’s on. Here’s the opening of, “Graveyard Shift,” written in the early 1970s and published in his first short story collection, “Night Shift.”

Two A.M., Friday.
Hall was sitting on the bench by the elevator, the only place on the third floor where a working joe could catch a smoke, when Warwick came up. He wasn’t happy to see Warwick. The foreman wasn’t supposed to show up on three during the graveyard shift; he was supposed to stay down in his office in the basement drinking coffee from the urn that stood on the corner of his desk. Besides, it was hot.

It was the hottest June on record in Gates Falls, and the Orange Crush thermometer which was also by the elevator had once rested at 94 degrees at three in the morning. God only knew what kind of hellhole the mill was on the three-to-eleven shift.

Hall worked the picker machine, a balky gadget manufactured by a defunct Cleveland firm in 1934. He had only been working in the mill since April, which meant he was still making minimum $1.78 an hour, which was still all right. No wife, no steady girl, no alimony. He was a drifter, and during the last three years he had moved on his thumb from Berkeley (college student) to Lake Tahoe (busboy) to Galveston (stevedore) to Miami (short-order cook) to Wheeling (taxi driver and dishwasher) to Gates Falls, Maine (picker-machine operator). He didn’t figure on moving again until the snow fell. He was a solitary person and he liked the hours from eleven to seven when the blood flow of the big mill was at its coolest, not to mention the temperature.

The only thing he did not like was the rats.

Stephen King, “Graveyard Shift.”

Because short stories are, by definition, short, you have to pack a lot into a small space. Some short story writers do this by reciting a bunch of setting and backstory up front, sort of mechanically, like, Whew, got that out of the way, now I can get down to the business of telling this story. King does that here, only he doesn’t do it mechanically.

Here’s what we now know in 4 short paragraphs:

• Our main character is Hall, and he doesn’t like his boss, Warwick.
• We’re in Gates Falls, Maine, in the summer, where it’s hot, and Hall is working the graveyard shift in some kind of factory.
• Hall is in a bad mood and is the kind of employee who sneaks off to grab a smoke away from his boss.
• Hall’s current job and entire work and life history, covered in one 132-word paragraph written in the character’s voice.
• There are rats. And given that this is a Stephen King story, we know those rats are going to be a problem.

In about a page, we know everything we need to know to get into the story–and we aren’t bored by backstory, because King keeps it short and gives it to us in the character’s voice. And we’re already worried about the rats.

This is masterful. Damn, I wish I’d written it.

What I did write: an excerpt from Adam Carmona and the Case of the Saguaro Ripper

I explicitly used “Graveyard Shift” as a model for how to begin my short story, “Adam Carmona and the Case of the Saguaro Ripper.” I don’t think I did it nearly as well as King, but I’m (slowly) learning. Here’s the opening:

On a bright January morning, Detective Adam Carmona of the Tucson PD exited his unmarked SUV and surveyed the latest scene. Another killing, the sixth in as many months.

“Detective Carmona,” one of the uniforms inside the cordon of tape called. “The vic is—”

Carmona held up a hand and the officer fell silent. She must have been new to working a Carmona crime scene, otherwise she’d have known he liked to approach his scenes fresh, cataloging details uncolored by the observations of others.

He picked at the Band-Aid on his finger and proceeded to catalog: remote desert area, a few hundred yards off a dirt road outside Ironwood Forest. The first two in this string of serial murders had been just inside the city limits, which was how Carmona’d gotten involved. Now he was the head of a joint task force with the Pima County Sheriff’s Department, trying to catch the most prolific serial killer in Tucson history. And failing.

Shameless plug: this story is published in Trouble in Tucson, an anthology published in conjunction with the Left Coast Crime conference happening in Tucson next month. Watch for a separate post in the next week or so with details, including links to purchase.

Oh, and I tried to twist like Deaver, but you’ll have to read the whole story to see how well I pulled that off. Spoiler alert: not as well as Deaver.

Writing Memes

Me, this coming November: [writes the phrase, “50,000 words.”}

[Orders my NaNoWriMo winner shirt.]

Now if you see me acting creepy at Starbuck’s, you’ll know why.

I decided to test this hypothesis over the last year, you know, for science. I’m sorry to report that it appears to be true.

That’s it for me. I need to get back to vibing with writing my novel.

How about you? Is there an author whose talent you wish you had? A story or a passage or even a sentence you wish you’d written?