Trace Evidence

The current (July 23) issue of The New Yorker includes an article by Jack Hitt on forensic linguistics. I loved the description: “If ‘forensic linguist’ brings to mind a verbal specialist who plucks slivers of meaning from old letters and segments of audiotape before announcing that the perpetrator is, say, a middle-aged insurance salesman from Philadelphia, that’s not far from the truth.” The field had its fifteen minutes in the ’90s, when its techniques helped identify Ted Kaczynski as the Unabomber and Joe Klein as the anonymous author of Primary Colors, but it continues to play a role in courtrooms.

A passage that particularly struck me was: “Most people assume that meaning is embedded in the words they speak. But, according to forensic linguists, meaning is far more vaporous, teased into existence through vocalized puffs of air, hand gestures, body tilts, dancing eyebrows, and nuanced nostril flares . . . And context is crucial; when we try to record a conversation, we are capturing only part of the gestalt of that moment.”

This got me thinking about dialog in fiction. Of course, dialog is never realistic: it mostly excludes the uhms and ahs, the Continue reading →

Rob Lopresti recently posted his own version of a How’d That Happen piece over on the SleuthSayers blog, describing the genesis of his story “Brutal” from the current (September 2012) issue.

Also, on SleuthSayers, Leigh Lundin offers some commentary (taking time from an amazing-sounding trip) on that same September issue.

And Diana Deverell has announced the e-publication of Run & Gun: A Dozen Tales of Girls with Guns, most of which first appeared in AHMM. Diana’s character. Dawna Shepherd, is an FBI agent, but her experiences as a college basketball star for the University of Texas help her to process information quickly and to land on her feet when the unexpected is thrown her way.

Kurt Vonnegut’s Eight Rules for Writing a Short Story, which originally appeared in his collection Bagombo Snuff Box, are a perennial favorite of bloggers because of their blog-friendly humor and pith, so I would probably be well advised to stay away from such familiar material, but I think they are worth sharing and discussing because they are specifically rules for writing short stories.

(Among other places, you can find them here, here, and here.)

Rule One is “Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.” I love the fact that Vonnegut foregrounds the duty of the writer to the reader. In fact, he goes on to declare that this is the only inviolable rule.

I read a lot of short stories that don’t work, and one characteristic that many share is that they feel as if they were written Continue reading →

B. K. Stevens has written a nice guest post about her AHMM story “Adjuncts Anonymous” at Schooled in Mystery, a blog devoted to academic mysteries. You can hear her read the story by downloading an audio file from iTunes or PodOmatic.

Over on the Dorothy-L list, there’s been a discussion recently about the use, or over-use, of weather in mystery novels (and, by extension, fiction in general). If I must give an opinion, I’ll say that weather is like many of the other tools available to the writer: it may be used well or poorly, depending on the skill of the author. The Dorothy-L discussion has highlighted many fine examples of its effective use.

But I welcome the discussion mostly because it gives me an excuse to post a favorite bit from a favorite writer, Mark Twain, which at least shows that discussions of the deployment of weather in fiction have been going on for some time. The preface to one of Twain’s books reads:

THE WEATHER IN THIS BOOK.

No weather will be found in this book. This is an attempt to pull a book through without weather. It being the first attempt of the kind in fictitious literature, it may prove a failure, but it seemed worth the while of some dare-devil person to try it, and the author was in just the mood.

Many a reader who wanted to read a tale through was not able to do it because of delays on account of the weather. Nothing breaks up an author’s progress like having to stop every few pages to fuss-up the weather. Thus it is plain that persistent intrusions of weather are bad for both reader and author.

Of course weather is necessary to a narrative of human experience. That is conceded. But it ought to be put where it will not be in the way; where it will not interrupt the flow of the narrative. And it ought to be the ablest weather that can be had, not ignorant, poor-quality, amateur weather. Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article of it. The present author can do only a few trifling ordinary kinds of weather, and he cannot do those very good. So it has seemed wisest to borrow such weather as is necessary for the book from qualified and recognized experts–giving credit, of course. This weather will be found over in the back part of the book, out of the way. See Appendix. The reader is requested to turn over and help himself from time to time as he goes along.

Continue reading →