Episode 212 - What Writers Can Learn from The First Two Pages with Art Taylor

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Art Taylor discusses WHAT WRITERS CAN LEARN FROM THE FIRST TWO PAGES, including the backstory of why "two pages"; the power of being a percolator (in addition to a plotter or pantser); how research can engender a story; waiting as a mechanism of conflict and suspense; short fiction as an experimental platform; the importance of thinking consciously about the craft issues and studying what gets scrapped; considering advise from veteran and first-time writers; and the power of starting with a bang ... or not.

Art Taylor is the Edgar Award-winning author of two collections: THE ADVENTURE OF THE CASTLE THIEF AND OTHER EXPEDITIONS AND INDISCRETIONS and THE BOY DETECTIVE & THE SUMMER OF ’74 AND OTHER TALES OF SUSPENSE. His debut book, ON THE ROAD WITH DEL & LOUISE: A NOVEL IN STORIES, won the Agatha Award for Best First Novel. His short fiction has also won the Agatha, Anthony, Derringer, and Macavity Awards. He is an associate professor of English at George Mason University.

Episode Links

Author website: www.arttaylorwriter.com
Facebook profile: facebook.com/artTaylorShortStories
Instagram profile: www.instagram.com/arttaylorwriter/
LinkedIn profile: www.linkedin.com/in/arttaylorwriter/

Transcript

The following is created by entering the Descript AI-generated transcript into ChatGPT with the prompt Correct spelling and grammatical mistakes in this transcript.

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to the Indie Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Art Taylor. Hey Art, how are you doing?
 
[00:00:06] Art: Good, how are you? Thanks for having me.
 
[00:00:08] Matty: I am pleased to have you here.
 
Meet Art Taylor
 
[00:00:09] Matty: To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Art Taylor is the Edgar Award-winning author of two collections, "The Adventure of The Castle Thief and Other Expeditions and Indiscretions," and "The Boy Detective in the Summer of '74, and Other Tales of Suspense." His debut book, "On the Road with Del and Louise," a novel in stories, won the Agatha Award for Best First Novel.
 
His short fiction has also won the Agatha, Anthony, Derringer, and Macavity awards, and he is an associate professor of English at George Mason University. I met Art when I think we were both at Malice Domestic, and I attended one of your panel discussions, and I just thought it was so great. I did a little research on you after that, and I came across The First Two Pages.
 
So, before we dive into the focus of our conversation, I just wanted to ask you about what The First Two Pages are and what is the story behind that concept.
 
What is The First Two Pages?
 
[00:01:00] Art: Oh, sure. Thanks so much.
 
Um, you know, I'm very fortunate to be curating, and I use that word, The First Two Pages blog series. It was actually started by another short story writer in April of 2015, so it's been running for a while.
 
B. K. Stevens, Bonnie Stevens, was a terrific short story writer who came up with the idea of starting a blog. I'm going to read to you what she wrote to the folks who she recruited to participate. I hope the post on this blog will offer both writers and readers insights into how some successful opening pages were written.
 
What kinds of issues and approaches did the writers consider? What sort of decisions did they make? How did they create opening pages that made agents or editors keep reading? Why did these first pages work? I think your post will interest other readers if it offers them ideas they can use in their works.
 
I think it will interest your readers if it helps them understand why they've enjoyed your work so much. You know, there's the idea Noah Lukman wrote the first five pages. If you can't capture an agent's attention, an editor's attention in the first five pages, you've lost them.
 
[00:02:04] Matty: Or readers.
 
[00:02:05] Art: Stories, your readers, exactly. And if in a short story, is it the first five paragraphs? There's some shortness there. So a lot of that is how do you capture readers' attention?
 
Bonnie passed away in August of 2017, kind of abruptly right on the, in fact, as we were going to the Suffolk Mystery Authors Festival in Suffolk, Virginia, and she did not attend and passed away soon after that.
 
Her family asked me to continue the series; I had been a contributor there. Bonnie and I were terrific friends, and our thoughts about the short stories were very similar in many ways, as we found on panels at Malice and in other places. So I've been pleased to carry it on since then. It's hard to believe that I have carried it on longer than she did it because I still feel like it's her blog, in many ways, but I'm grateful to be able to curate it.
 
So that's some background on The First Two Pages.
 
[00:02:57] Matty: That's great. And I think that even for a longer work, first two pages is a great target because you were talking about the first five pages concept and certainly you want to grab a reader in the first five pages. But I think that as time goes on, even with a long work, maybe The First Two Pages are, you know. The key pages, writers should be looking at anyway.
 
[00:03:15] Art: Yeah, absolutely. I think there's so much that can be done there. I mean, it's, and it has to do with so many things. You know, are we laying the first clues of the plot? Are we introducing our characters? We're trying to... Get some conflict and tension introduced, but also give some—I hate to use this word—but backstory, you know, fold some backstory in. So there's a lot that has to be done, and so I do think it's a good place to focus this kind of attention.
 
[00:03:41] Matty: Yeah, perfect. So I had asked you to just go through your experience with The First Two Pages blog and pull out some best practices, the top lessons that you and your readers have learned from The First Two Pages. And so I'm just going to work through some of these.
 
[00:03:56] Matty: And the first one is everyone works differently. What did you learn about everyone works differently?
 
[00:04:01] Art: Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I think there's a sense in which if we can just get the magic formula, you know, then we'll know what to do, and it's the same way that people ask the question, how do you write if you're a writer? As if we could just figure it out.
 
What time to write and that sort of thing. I think the same thing is true with The First Two Pages, and what I found was how very different everybody is, how very different people come to stories. Number one, where the ideas come from, and then also the way they start the story itself. But then also the way that their process is about writing in general.
 
We hear about pantsers and plotters. There are people that I've hosted on the blog who have mapped out everything about a story before they've put down word one. And other folks who are like, well, I've got this idea, and it's about a paragraph long, and then let me see what happens next. So there's that range.
 
And of course, many of the writers talk about the genesis of a short story. Whether it's like, I read this book, or this story, and this prompted me in this direction, or I had a dream, or I was taking a trip and something about the setting, or here's an idea situation I conjured up. So I think it's interesting to see every stage of the process there.
 
Where an idea comes from, how it propels a writer toward the page, and then how they think about those blank pages and how they're going to approach them. Another thing I think is interesting is how many writers discover something about their own craft as they begin writing the essay. I've had so many people write to me as they've turned in their essay and say, you know what, I didn't realize what I'd done here until I started trying to articulate what I'd done.
 
In some cases, there is a sense in which a veteran writer, particularly, may have absorbed a lot of these craft techniques where they're not thinking about it. The same way a golfer, you know, when I've tried to play golf, it's like, put this finger here, put this hand here, make sure it interlocks there, and I joke with my students, like, well, Tiger Woods doesn't do that whenever he grabs a golf club because it becomes natural.
 
When they're forced to articulate it, though, that's where some of those craft choices come to mind. I will say, if I'm not going on too long, this is something that I've done myself. When I wrote an essay for Bonnie, Bonnie asked me to write about a story called "Parallel Play." And when she asked me about it, I realized that I knew where I wanted to talk about.
 
There's a scene in this story. It's about a young mother at one of these kind of Gymboree places with her son who finds herself getting into some trouble as they're leaving, and there's a scene in which one of the men in the story kind of forces his way through a door, and I thought, that is something I can talk about.
 
That wasn't until 40 percent of the story when I looked back, and suddenly, I was trying to realize, well, what had I done in The First Two Pages that laid the groundwork for everything ahead? So I think there's a process in which not only the readers and the writers can learn something, but the writers themselves will learn something about their own craft just by articulating some of those craft choices.
 
Being a percolator
 
[00:07:11] Matty: Well, one of the things that I think you said at Mouse Domestic, and I wrote this down immediately, is that everybody knows about plotters and pantsers, but you talked about being a percolator. Was that you?
 
[00:07:22] Art: Yes, that was me, and
 
[00:07:24] Matty: Tell me about that. I just love that.
 
[00:07:27] Art: Coming back to it, you know, I mean, you hear about plotters, and I know novelists — I can mention two of them, James Ellroy and Jeffrey Deaver, who plot out every step of the book before they ever write anything. In fact, outlines that are going to run almost as long as the book.
 
I think people with short stories do the same thing. And then folks, as I said, who start out in the middle. You know, I get an idea, and a lot of times, before I write about it, I just take walks, ride around in the car, or if I've got part of it done, then I step away from it, and then, again, to use that word, percolate.
 
I just let stuff bubble up inside. What are the possibilities for this story? And I'm going to come back to The First Two Pages with this. What have I laid down, maybe in the opening that I've written, that provides some of the threads that I want to follow up on without my maybe knowing it?
 
I'm going to come up with this idea that, you know, there's a great book I'd recommend called "Narrative Design" by Madison Smart Bell, if only because of the essay in the beginning about the unconscious art. We do a lot of stuff creatively without thinking about what it is, and so I try to turn around and listen to whatever I've done creatively to see what I've laid down that might have some longer resonance with the plot. And a lot of times, that just takes thinking about it, getting away from the computer and letting it percolate a little bit to see what brews.
 
[00:09:00] Matty: Yeah, that's why word count has never worked for me because I'm writing not only when I'm sitting at the keyboard, and a lot of times I'm folding the laundry or walking the dog or, you know, driving to the grocery store or whatever, and I'm writing, percolating away. And so by the time I sit down, I have a clear idea of what I want to capture.
 
I'm just having this interesting experience with the book I'm working on now, which is my fourth Lizzy Ballard thriller. And there are two poker scenes. I'm not a poker player. The first poker scene is the first scene in the book.
 
And then there's one about halfway through. So I was trying to learn about poker while I was writing the book. And so in the first chapter, even the first chapter that I gave my editor, I had to put in a thing that said, "And then she plays poker" because I was really struggling with how to present it.
 
Spoiler alert, but it's not standard poker because she's reading the minds of the other people who are playing the game. And so it's not like I can kind of do standard poker research. It's different. And I am going to 20 Books Vegas in November. So I thought, okay, I'm just going to wait until I get to 20 Books Vegas to write this scene.
 
Or, I should say, I'm just going to wait until I get to Las Vegas to write this scene, kind of independent of 20 Books, but finally, thanks to friends, poker-playing friends, and YouTube, I finally got to write this scene. I got my brain around what I needed to have this poker scene be. However, there's a long way of setting up the fact that it's the first time I've given my editor what I felt was an editor-ready copy that still had the first chapter that was very, very sketchy. So once I got my brain around it, I've been working on that first chapter, and I realized that there's a risk. Because I'm kind of working on it out of order, the tone of the first chapter is starting to feel very different, almost like more of a short story. Because I know I have like 2,200 words, and I'm polishing them and polishing them and polishing them, which is important for the first chapter. But I almost feel like there's a risk I'm going to polish them too much, and now it's going to go from kind of like a short story vibe to a novel vibe, which is like, less fussy about exactly weird descriptive words, like, I don't know that I would have called something Azure before.
 
After the first chapter, is what I'm describing sounding familiar to you, either as a writer or as a teacher?
 
[00:11:24] Art: Yeah, I think it's interesting, you know, the way that something comes together and the way you're trying to get it as a whole there. We think about the opening; I understand what you're saying as setting the foundation, not just for plot and character and all that, but for tone and style and everything. And when you go back and try to maybe retrofit something, you know, there are some challenges into making it seamless. Is that kind of what you're talking about?
 
[00:11:50] Matty: Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's more of a change in tone, just as you're saying.
 
[00:11:55] Art: Yeah. And, you know, I'm a writer who doesn't necessarily, to be honest, always start with The First Two Pages. You know, sometimes I'll write something that's going to show up later in a short story and a primary, like short stories, something that'll show up later in a short story, even the end of a short story, and then it's a matter of how am I going to get a piece that I'm writing later that actually is earlier to work together.
 
And I think that's a challenge. This goes back to reinforce that there are a lot of different ways that a process can work, a lot of different ways that writers approach this. But I'm going to echo another point that you said as well about folding the laundry. You know, I've had people talk about they have to write 500 words a day or 1,000 words a day.
 
My advice is always don't focus on that, but just focus on steady steps forward. Whatever those steps are and wherever you're adding something to a manuscript, there are a lot of times when I'll write a lot during the day and other times when it's just. Use that word again, percolating in my head. That still counts as writing to me. And it is a matter of then fitting all the pieces together.
 
[00:13:00] Matty: Yeah, I think we're all doing all three of those things, plotting, pantsing, and percolating. It's just that one is more based at home, that we feel most comfortable with, and the other ones are maybe more of a stretch because everybody's got to plot at some point, and everybody pantses at some point, and everybody's percolating too. But sometimes they do it with their fingers on the keyboard, and sometimes they don't.
 
[00:13:17] Art: Yeah, I will say as well, you talked about kind of doing research and having to do the research. I'll fill in this scene later. You know, it's interesting the way that, looking at The First Two Pages that I've read, research can engender a story, can help to bring it along. I host the Edgar Award finalists each year, and I've hosted the Agatha Award finalists before as well.
 
I invited him to do an essay. James Ziskin did one, gosh, I guess it was a year and a half ago. I think it was, or maybe it was two years ago. I mean, post-COVID, all time is weird. But James Ziskin did a piece where he had written a Sherlock pastiche, and he was nominated for the Edgar for it.
 
It was interesting; the research he did, he looked at the concordance, read the Sherlock Holmes stories (he said he hadn't read them in a long time), and then looked at the concordance. See, what are the words that keep coming up in the Sherlock Holmes stories? And then looked at, and I'm going to check this out and make sure I have it right, the Ngram viewer on Google to look at word frequency, at the era in which he was writing.
 
So a lot of this was at the level of language. Let me do research about what was the vocabulary used at the time and let that contribute to things. In the same way you're talking about, let me go and see how poker is done. Let me immerse myself in some way in that world. What's going to come out of that?
 
And then the hope is that's going to lay a foundation for what's coming next, even though you're laying some of that foundation later. So yes, it's a challenge, I think.
 
[00:14:45] Matty: Yeah, and I think that idea of balancing the careful research with what you want to actually use in the story because I got to the point where I understood the poker terminology, and I have a friend who has actually played competitive poker, tournament poker, and she had given me a proposal for the game that this woman could play, but I realized that it was so heavy with poker terminology that would be unfamiliar to the reader, that I almost had to understand what she was saying at a more complex level, and then I had to dumb it down because this is not a book that's intended for poker players primarily, and so I have to create the excitement of the game without diving into too much detail, and I'm actually having fun watching, you know, what poker players consider the best movie poker scenes because that's, I think, a good example where the moviemakers have had to dumb it down a bit and yet still capture the emotion of the game.
 
[00:15:42] Art: Yep. Absolutely. I teach at Mason, as we said, I taught a course in spy novels and I taught an Ian Fleming book, "Casino Royale." It's amazing how much card playing is in the James Bond. We watch the movies, and you don't think about how much card playing. There's lots of card playing in the James Bond novel. So I would recommend you look in that direction, see how he manages that too. He does a good job of it, I think.
 
[00:16:03] Matty: Yeah, I just yesterday watched one where they're betting like 150 million dollars or something like that. That was super fun. And what I liked about that was there is a point where James Bond is looking at the guy he's finally betting against. It's just down to the two of them.
 
And there's a long period where he's just looking at him. I mean, it's probably only a few seconds, but in movie time, it feels very long. And you can tell he's kind of waiting to see if his opponent is going to have a tell. Super fun.
 
Waiting as a Mechanism of Conflict and Suspense
 
[00:16:36] Art: Yeah, I would say that's kind of a transition to another point. Something I've learned from The First Two Pages, and it brings us back to Bonnie as well, is about this idea of what conflict is, where tension is. You talk about the idea of just looking and waiting, and we don't think of that as action, you know, and yet it can be very suspenseful or a transition a little bit.
 
One of the things that I've learned from The First Two Pages is counterintuitive about what you can do, could do in the first two pages to capture the reader's attention without starting out at high conflict, without doing everything with a bang, I guess I should say. Bonnie, in addition to starting the blog, also contributed a couple of essays to it.
 
The last essay she did was on her story, "The Last Blue Glass." And I'm going to read what she said there. Conflict, we know, lies at the heart of fiction. That seems especially true of mystery fiction, where conflict leads to a crime. But it's not always possible or appropriate to open a mystery with a moment of intense conflict.
 
Sometimes I think it's more effective to begin with a quiet scene that drops hints about conflicts to come. If our characters are engaging, so engaging that readers both expect and dread the conflict, that can be a good way to keep them turning pages. And I thought about that a little bit, what you're talking about with a card scene, where not a lot is happening, and yet there's so much happening in terms of the way somebody's watching this, what the stakes are, how things are going to play.
 
It can be very quiet and yet very suspenseful. The conventional wisdom is to start with a body, start with something active, start with, and yet a lot of times I find that what works best is to lay these, what Patricia Highsmith called these lines of action or lines of tension between people, even if it's kind of quiet. If people can sense some tension and get to know the characters, they're going to invest in a different way than you.
 
Thank you. Then, if you just try to start with a body, with action, with movement, with a chase.
 
Studying What Gets Scrapped
 
[00:18:41] Art: One of the other essays I come back to again and again from The First Two Pages archive is Nick Kolakowski on "A Nice Pair of Guns." He started out writing this story, as he said, in medias res, you know, with action and with this happening. He said he kept thinking, got that gut feeling as a writer that something wasn't right there.
 
And he said he scrapped it. These are actually the most fascinating essays for me, where a writer says, here's what I did, here's what I scrapped, here's what I revised, here's why I changed it. Because I think it gives insight not only into the first draft but that revised draft, that final draft.
 
I'm going to read what he says as well. As any writer will tell you, there are times when you'll finish a draft and know there's something fundamentally wrong with it, but you can't figure out why. In the case of "A Nice Pair of Guns," I eventually decided that opening mid-story with a lot of action forced me to push way too much plot into the middle and end of the tale.
 
I might have succeeded in grabbing the reader's attention at the outset, but the story as a whole felt profoundly unbalanced. So when it came time to write the second draft, I decided to discard my fears about the hypothetical reader's attention span and begin at the beginning. I've got to tell you, I love that.
 
Follow your gut, follow your instinct, think through, and also write different versions of the same story to see where I'm going to introduce the tension that serves the reader. My story best rather than follow the conventional wisdom. So that made me, you're talking about the card scene, made me think about all that. How much can be invested in a quiet scene?
 
Short fiction as an experimental platform
 
[00:20:19] Matty: Well, the nice thing about short fiction is that you wouldn't want to do this with a novel, but you could write three or four, 12 or however many it takes, versions of the same story in a way that you would never want to do. You know, it would become a lifetime effort if you were to try to do that with a novel, but if you're writing three or four or five thousand words, you can keep putting the pieces together in different ways and see what the reaction is for you and maybe for early readers as well.
 
[00:20:44] Art: Yeah. It takes a lot of bravery to scrap something and start over to try something different with a short story. I think there's the possibility for that, as you said, often go to my son. I've told this before, when my son was little, you know, he was trying to walk and he took his first steps and it's like, well, you took a step and fell and took two steps and fell, but eventually got where he's going. Talk about the process, one step, two steps, you'll eventually get there if you just keep taking the steps. The other one is about the kind of willingness to tear something apart. If he's putting together a Lego. Something. Kids would be like, all right, I see a new idea. Let me rip this apart and start over. Whereas as writers, a lot of times we're like, gosh, I've put so much work into that. I can't, I have to, you know, and there is something, which I think is, you know, it takes a leap of faith to be like, tear it up. Let me start over or let me try something else as an alternative. So that's another thing from The First Two Pages that I've learned is writers who are willing to take those steps often get something much better out of it at the end.
 
[00:21:50] Matty: Yeah, I think the interesting thing about the Lego analogy is that the nice thing writers have is that they can keep the original construction and make a new one. You know, with Legos, unless you have an endless supply of Legos, you have to take the first one apart to make the second one. With writers, you can just set the first one aside and say, maybe I'll come back to that or maybe I won't.
 
[00:22:09] Art: Yep. Absolutely. Always an extra file. A new version. That's the perfect way to do it. Nothing's lost. Nothing's lost. 

Thinking consciously about the craft issues
 
[00:22:15] Matty: Yep. Exactly. So I feel like we're probably kind of hitting some of the topics you brought up as learnings you had from The First Two Pages. But another one was, many people don't think consciously about the craft issues. I feel like we've hit that a little bit, but other learnings you've had along those lines?
 
[00:22:33] Art: Yeah. You know, it's interesting to see writers who are forced to look back at what they've done and try to think through as readers. What they did? Why here instead of someplace else? Why introduce this bit of dialogue there? And so, I think that's an interesting move, both in terms of what I said about accepting the first draft as maybe something unconscious that you're doing, and then turning consciousness to it. It's also part of, in terms of recommending process for writers, something that I recommend to my students at Mason. We don't always have the option to do this because of the shortness of the semester, but a lot of times I'll say, write something, and then put it aside for a while so that you're coming back to it with greater objectivity, with a reader's eyes, with seeing it. I think as we write more often, we hopefully develop the capacity to not need six months to put something aside to be able to see what's there and come back to it the next day or a week later, or obviously rely on beta readers for some feedback there. But I think trying to get that step from creator to reader.

Of your own work, it's an important part of the process, not just for a specific product, but also for your writing process generally. What is working best for me? How do I get to that point of reading objectively to revise? I'm going to go back to Bonnie Stevens again. Bonnie used to try to read some of her pages backward, as I recall. Once she had a full draft, she'd be like, "Alright, let me read this page and then move back to this," because she was reading it with a different eye.
 
Change the font. These are not things from The First Two Pages, but change the font. It forces you to see things differently. Read just a couple of pages and then stop and come back and read a couple more. Some of that will force you to not get lost in what you're doing, but rather to keep that, I come back to this phrase, that objective eye on your own work, your own craft choices.
 
So, I do think most people, a lot of times, don't think about it, whatever stage they're at, in terms of beginning writer, veteran writer, and yet it's worthwhile to stop, pause, and actually think through your choices.
 
[00:24:52] Matty: Perfect. Another lesson you had mentioned from the first few pages is ideas come from a lot of places.
 
[00:24:59] Art: Oh, sure. Yeah, absolutely. I think I mentioned, you know, we have people who say, "I had a dream about something," or, "This is a memory from my childhood." I just hosted Kate Ellis. I'm starting a series right now, as we're recording this, on the anthology, "Happiness is a Warm Gun." And that was prime fiction inspired by the Beatles. Editor Josh Pachter does a series of these anthologies. Kate Ellis wrote an essay where she said, "Here's something that happened in my childhood," and she had grown up in Liverpool in the same area where the Beatles, two of them, grew up, and she said, "I went back to that as the starting point for the story."
 
That's terrific. We talked about the idea of song lyrics or songs inspiring things. I've had a lot of times where songs or something I've read have inspired me to think about, "Here's a what if story just going on." And you talk about research as well. I always host the Black Orchid, award winner. This is a novella award hosted by the Nero Wolf Society, Rex Stout. Jacqueline Freimor wrote last year about the case of the bogus Cinderellas. Bogus Cinderellas are stamps, and she said she'd read something on Atlas Obscura, just reading about this on stamps, and it prompted this idea. She went through a fascinating essay, went through a couple of ways to try to write this. I think she thought about it as a novel at one point, and then a short story, and then ultimately found the inspiration for what the story should be and then went on to win an award for it.
 
So, you never know where ideas are going to come from or what's going to spark things. Again, this goes back to different writers, different inspirations and influences, different processes, all that. There's no one way to do this, and that's one thing that keeps coming back to me. If there are a lot of ways to do it, you find your best way, or hopefully be inspired by some of these essays to be like, "Oh, I could do that. Here's another opening for me." I think that's moving us all in good directions.
 
Capturing your ideas
 
[00:26:59] Matty: Well, this might take us, such a tangent that we spend the entire rest of the time talking about it, but that idea of the bogus Cinderella's, right, is that what the phrase was. It brings to mind a conversation I was having online with some folks recently about where you store your ideas.
 
And so the dilemma I was finding myself in is that there were kind of three categories of ideas. One was, there's this concept of the Boca Cinderella stamps that would be super cool to include in a story. Another flavor is I really wanted to explore, like, the almost unhealthy tendency people have that is represented by collectors and what is really behind the whole concept of collecting and why would people care about having an unusual stamp or whatever.
 
And then there's like, "Oh, I really like that word. I'm sure I'm going to use that somewhere." And I'm just wondering if you have a system that you use that handles all three of those kinds of concepts because just as you have the, "I wrote this and I'm not going to use it now, but I'm going to put it in the file." I think there's the, "Here's the file of things that I might want to use in the future." But they're so different sometimes that I think it's hard to manage them. Any thoughts about that?
 
[00:28:10] Art: I am, um, you know, I try to be systematized about so many things in my life, but I always fall short in some ways it seems like. I do keep a notebook handy where I can write down a quick idea for something. I do keep a file on my computer where I'll write, you know, here's, talk about writing the first paragraph of something, or a paragraph that might end up somewhere.
 
Here's an idea I had and I wrote it down. Or again, like you said, here's a word, or, I mean, just the smallest thing. It's all over the place, though, and I've had the time, unfortunately, where I've gone back through my computer trying to clean up some stuff, and I opened a document, and I'm like, "Oh my gosh, I forgot completely about this. Where did that come from?" It ended up being not an idea I pursued, but the point is I wish I were more systematized so I could go back to the right place.
 
John Curran wrote about Agatha Christie's secret notebooks. I love these books in terms of what they tell us about the creative process. And she kept, I want to say it was like, there were 18 or 19 different notebooks, I've got the number wrong, but she didn't use them in order apparently, and so you'll find notes for a certain book in Notebook 16, as well as in Notebook 9, and in the midst of it, you might find a grocery list or something like that, so it's all over the place.
 
She seemed to do well with the unsystematized approach. The point is, write something down, get it somewhere, because it will stay there better. Then it does just in your mind. So I do try to get stuff down on paper in some place, even if I end up losing it.
 
[00:29:44] Matty: Well, I do kind of like the idea of the power of the physical page. And I can imagine having, you know, like three baskets in your office, one of which would be big ideas, one of which would be medium ideas, one of which would be small ideas. Maybe the small idea basket is tiny, and the big idea basket is big because one might be several pages of your written out or typed out notes, and one might be just little tiny pieces of paper where you're dropping in. And if you ever find yourself, like, at a loss, you could just take out a basket and start going through it and say, "Oh, cool. I haven't used the word azure forever!"
 
[00:30:14] Art: Yeah, and I think that's made me think about the ideas, not just the big ideas, it's the small ones. My notebook, as much as it might be filled with, "Here's an idea for a story," or "Here is a paragraph that's going to go in there," a lot of times it'll be like just some little stuff.
 
Yeah, phrase or little detail that I want to add to a scene I've been working on. And I don't have the time to go ahead and add it, so I just jot it down real quick so I can go back to it and remember. And that will a lot of times spark something, something bigger. So I think in terms of creativity, it's like, you know, obviously do whatever you need to keep that forward momentum, keep those ideas flowing, or keep those things percolating and come back to that word as well, and trust that it's going to go, hopefully where it needs to go.
 
Start with a bang... or not
 
[00:31:02] Matty: Another lesson that you would learn from The First Two Pages, which I think we've discussed, but you may have some things to add, is start with a bang or not. Were there any other thoughts you had about that?
 
[00:31:12] Art: Sure, yeah, that's kind of what I was talking about a little bit with Bonnie and with Nick Kolakowski, the idea of starting with something quiet. But I'm going to take this a little further. There are so many ways to start a story. Patricia Highsmith, whom I've come back to again and again, she has a great craft book.
 
Well, no, it's an awful craft book. It is very inspiring, but it is not the kind of craft book that people read to be like, "Here is step by step how to do something." It is more like, "Here's some ideas." But Patricia Highsmith would start a story with setting, you know, this thing we're not supposed to do, but she would start with this long description of setting in a story like "The Black House." Then in a story like "The Terrapin," she starts with this moment of great conflict, or small conflict, that leads to great conflict between a mother and her son, a little bit of dialogue, and a little bit of action, real short paragraph. I think this goes to the idea again that you don't have to start with action.
 
In the beginning, there's a lot of opportunity to begin in many places and still engage a reader, whether that's with—and I keep throwing out craft books—Michael Kardos has a great book, "The Art and Craft of Fiction," where he talks about the five elements of scene building: dialogue, narration (by which he means not just narrating things, but actual action, like stage directions), description, interiority, or exposition (by which he doesn't mean just backstory, but just like a little sentence of information).
 
You could start with dialogue. Start quickly with dialogue. Let us learn later who the people are that are talking. Other folks might argue, "Well, let's not start with dialogue. We want to know who people are talking to first. Give a little bit of description, then jump into the dialogue." Or as Patricia Highsmith did in "The Black House," start with this long paragraph about the city where "The Black House" is and the history of the city.
 
So, there's not one way of doing things. As long as you are finding a way, either through the prose, or through—I'm going to come back to this idea of lines of action, Trisha Heisman's lines of action—to begin to give a hint of conflict, a hint of tension, and I think your reader can pick up on even the small things, and then you can keep building on it. But again, there's not just one way of doing it. And that's one of the things that comes back again and again. Needless to say, I would encourage folks to look at the blog, first few pages, read some essays in order to see the wide range of approaches that writers can take and find possibilities of your own, experiment with things, see what's going to happen.
 
[00:33:51] Matty: I think that's always interesting, also, to listen to beta readers or read reviews or whatever to hear what other people's reactions are to, like starting a story with a long scene description, which as you're saying goes against most of the advice, but you might find that people are commenting that they're gripped by that, and that would be good input to have.
 
[00:34:11] Art: I had a time; this is my own kind of—this is not a first few pages essay but a story. I'd written a story, which was eventually published, called "Mrs. Marple and the Hit and Run." And I remember writing it for a reading. I'd written it originally for a reading, and it was long; it got long. It was 10,000 words long.
 
I was just going to read the first portion of it. And I read it to my then-girlfriend at the time, and my brother, and I could tell they were falling asleep. It was bad. I eventually cut the story, rearranged where the opening was, and cut the story from 10,000 words to about 2,500 words. So, I cut 75 percent of it out, and it was published in that way, but much stronger from having gone through that process of, "Let me try it first of all with some description, with some narration," and then it's like, "No, no, no, I got to start someplace else." I got to start someplace else. So, tinkering.
 
[00:35:00] Matty: Yeah, and I think that's the kind of thing that people who are writing novels have some leeway that people who are writing short stories don't because every once in a while, I'll kind of indulge myself by putting in a scene that tickles me and I think will tickle my readers too. And sometimes I actually get feedback that it's true, that I would never keep in, like, it's probably a darling I should kill, but I'm having so much fun with it, and then it turns out my readers do too. And I think you can do a little bit of that in longer work, whereas you probably can't do it in shorter work.
 
[00:35:29] Art: Yeah. Yep. Yep. Absolutely.
 
Advice from veteran versus first-time writers
 
[00:35:32] Matty: So, I think this takes us to the last tip, which I love, which is veteran writers versus first-time writers offering advice. What have you learned from The First Two Pages in that area?
 
[00:35:42] Art: Sure. You know, I mentioned Kate Ellis having a recent essay about her story, and actually, the story is "Happiness is a Warm Gun." But I'm also running an essay from the same anthology, by Kristopher Zgorski and Dru Ann Love, two bloggers whom many of us know and love, who are writing together their first piece of published fiction.
 
And so I've got their essay, and in the essay, Kristopher says, "We realize that we're new. We don't need to be offering advice to anybody on this," and yet, the insights they had into the creative process were terrific. My point: veteran writers obviously have a ton of experience, and we look at them for authority.
 
And I've been very fortunate that writers who are big-time established writers have been generous with their time, contributing an essay to the blog. I've had Martin Edwards and Peter Lovesy and Andrew Taylor, to mention three people who've won the CWA Diamond Dagger award for lifetime achievement who have contributed essays to the blog.
 
I've been generous with their experience, but I also find myself learning something from those folks, like Chris and Drew Ann, or like Sarah Cotter, or like Lisa Matthews, Lisa Q. Matthews, who are first-time writers who are being like, "Here's what I discovered, here's what I thought about." They're bringing a lot of enthusiasm about new perspectives, a lot of discovery.
 
And the excitement of discovery to kind of what they're doing with short fiction, and I think that we other writers and we readers can learn from that, as well as we can learn from the professional veteran writer, so to speak, and so there's excitement to have that range. It's like in the classroom as well.
 
I learn from my students. Some of the things they do will oftentimes excite me in new directions, whether it's process or product or a detail or something like that. So always know that you can learn from many directions.

[00:37:34] Matty: Well, one of my bucket list interviews is going to be Stephen King, and the question I'm going to ask him is, what advice have you published that you now wish people hadn't taken so much to heart because they think that if they follow it, they're going to enjoy your success? Like, are adverbs really that bad?
 
And the thing that always makes me think about it when I'm reading one of his books is that I've got to believe that Stephen King's editor pretty much lets Stephen get away with whatever he wants to. And, that he'll go on these long, tangential stories about, and then we put on a play, kind of things.
 
And I love that kind of stuff. And he gets to do it because... You know, the book would be only 300 pages if he didn't, but now it's 450 pages, but he's Stephen King, so he can do it. But I don't think he would say, "Feel free to write these completely tangential subplots." And, I just sometimes wonder if he thinks, "What have I created?"
 
Because there are all these people who are like following the Stephen King way, but he was known as Stephen King, and I don't think he would have given the early Stephen King that advice.
 
[00:38:40] Art: Yeah, you know, that is so true in many ways, and there's a couple of directions I could go in with that. I think I'm not going to.
 
[00:38:48] Matty: No? Please feel free if you'd like.
 
[00:38:51] Art: Well, I mean, it's a matter of, you know, practice what you preach to some degree. But also, I mean, Stephen King is brilliant in so many ways, and we go with this idea of how you think about craft and what you might advise somebody who is struggling to get a story right is different from what somebody might be able to do once they learn the craft. I'm a take it out of writing, you know, Pablo Picasso can draw a few lines and they look really, really good.
 
And somebody out there is going to say like, "Well, my four-year-old could do that," but the four year old doesn't have the background and the learning to understand why this line, why that line, what this line does. And there's something that is sort of magical about, you know, about an artist in whatever field who has learned so much and then can do something different with it.
 
David Foster Wallace is, this is where I was hesitating to go. David Foster Wallace was, you know, obviously a brilliant writer, and he's got these long sentences and digressions and he's got footnotes and he's got asides and he's indulgent in so many ways and yet if you take a look at it, it works. When I've had students in the past, increasingly less these days, when I first started teaching, I had students who were just enamored of David Foster Wallace, and they tried to do that in their own work, and it didn't work.
 
[00:40:23] Matty: But if you listen to Wallace, as I did just the other day, talk about here are some suggestions for writers to follow. He's not just glibly filling the page with junk and free writes. He's really carefully constructing all this stuff, and I think that's something that writers will skip. Practice what you preach, yes, and it's not always about don't use the adverb, but use the adverb well, or use the adverb when you need to, and there comes a point where Stephen King can use an adverb, and I apologize, but it's, I love that. I'll have to percolate on that.
 
[00:41:02] Art: Yeah, there you go, there you go, bring it back, percolate it.
 
[00:41:05] Matty: Yes. Well, Art, this has been so much fun. Thank you so much for sharing your best lessons from The First Two Pages, and please let the listeners and viewers know where they can go to find out more about you and The First Two Pages and everything else you do online. Great.
 
[00:41:18] Art: Sure, my website is arttaylorwriter.com. The First Two Pages is a page on that website, part of the blog on that website, so if you go to arttaylorwriter.com, you'll actually just scroll down and you'll see The First Two Pages down there. It also has links to BK Stevens' website, which is still available; again, she passed away in 2017. But the archive of those original first two pages is at her website that's linked from mine on each and every first two pages essay. Check it out.
 
[00:41:51] Matty: Thank you so much.

Episode 210 - Constructing a Compelling Series with Sara Rosett

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Sara Rosett discusses Constructing a Compelling Series, including the three types of series; how to extend your series beyond your original plan; preparing your readers for changes in your series; what happens when the flat arc protagonist is overshadowed by the antagonist; using a spin-off to extend a series; supplementing a series with short stories, or using a short story to experiment with a series concept; dealing with the challenges of being locked into your story world; and bringing a series to an end.

Sara Rosett is the USA Today bestselling author of 30 mysteries for readers who enjoy atmospheric settings and puzzling whodunits. She hosts two podcasts: MYSTERY BOOKS PODCAST for readers and, for writers, the WISH I’D KNOWN THEN PODCAST with Jami Albright. Sara also writes nonfiction for authors, including HOW TO OUTLINE A COZY MYSTERY and HOW TO WRITE A SERIES.

Episode Links

Author website: https://www.SaraRosett.com
Instagram profile: https://www.instagram.com/sararosett/

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello, and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Sara Rosette. Hey, Sara, how are you doing?
 
[00:00:05] Sara: Good, how are you?
 
[00:00:07] Matty: I'm doing great. Thank you.
 
Meet Sara Rosett
 
[00:00:08] Matty: To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Sara Rosette is the USA Today bestselling author of 30 mysteries for readers who enjoy atmospheric settings and puzzling whodunits.
 
She hosts two podcasts, the Mystery Book Podcast, that sounds good, for readers and for writers. The Wish I'd Known Then podcast, which I love, she co-hosts that with Jami Albright, and she also writes nonfiction for authors, including "How to Outline a Cozy Mystery" and "How to Write a Series."
 
Sara's background as a series author
 
[00:00:33] Matty: I was very intrigued with the "How to Write a Series" topic, so I invited Sara to the podcast to talk about that very topic.
 
And I thought it would be helpful, Sara, to just start out, give us a little background on your own series, so we have some context for the conversation.
 
[00:00:48] Sara: Sure. Yeah. I started out writing cozy mysteries. I was traditionally published first, and I wrote a 10-book cozy mystery series about a military spouse, which is what I was. Somehow, I thought this could be the hook for the series, that it's about a person who moves around a lot and is involved in military life, because that's something people don't know about.
 
And then, I transitioned into a hybrid author, still doing traditional cozies. I also did some indie books. So, I have a series that is a throwback to classic romantic suspense. It's more in the style of Mary Stewart and Elizabeth Peters, if you're familiar with those authors. It involves travel, mystery, intrigue, some murders, some not, and art theft. It's a mix of all the things I love. These books are cozy-ish but not purely cozy. They have mysteries, but they're not straight mysteries. They don't fit neatly into any one category. It's my first foray into indie publishing.
 
Then, I thought I might do better if I wrote a straight cozy as an indie author. So, I wrote a series about a location scout who's working in England, trying to find locations for a Jane Austen adaptation. It's a modern mystery set in England, and I got to indulge my love for all things Jane Austen and country houses. I got to explore these locations, and it did well. After that, I was really into reading 1920s and 1930s Golden Age mysteries, and I thought it would be great to write a series set in that time period.
 
So, I took the same location from the series about the location scout in England and went back to the 1920s, setting a series in that village. That's how my "High Society Lady Detective" series came about. It's by far the most popular series I have, and I'm continuing to write it. The other two series, I've kind of tapered off, and I'm not writing novels in them anymore. I might write short stories or do some special projects with the other series. But for now, I'm focused on the 1920s country house mystery genre.
 
[00:03:21] Matty: Oh, my goodness. We have hours and hours worth of conversation to have here. We'll have to try to control ourselves.
 
Complying (or not) with Genre Expectations
 
[00:03:28] Matty: So, the one you mentioned had some murder, some not. Is that a series or was it? A series, were those standalones.
 
[00:03:35] Sara: I originally thought, okay, this will be a trilogy. It'll consist of three books. And I wrote those three books. It's one of those series that, once it finds its reader, the readers are super passionate about it, but it doesn't have a really big audience. However, the readers who love it, really love it.
 
So they would email me, asking, "Can you write more?" And I thought, okay, I could do another book. So I wrote another book. We may talk about this later in the context of extending a series. Because when I got to the end of that fourth book, I thought, "Oh, I have an idea for how I could continue the series in a new story arc." A new story arc, like the first story arc was complete in the first three books. The fourth book is a transition. Then I continued the series for a couple more books because I found a new direction for my character to explore. So it turned into a longer series than I had originally plAnnd.
 
[00:04:28] Matty: That's really interesting and something, I don't know if this is just a one-shot answer or something that maybe we can, as you mentioned, weave through the rest of our conversation, is the idea that some have murder, some do not. I was just at a book club where they were reading my Ann Kinnear suspense novel, "The Falcon and the Owl," and it's the first one that has a whodunit aspect. But there's a murder right at the beginning, and the whodunit is not related to the murder at the beginning. It's a death that doesn't appear to be a murder until later, spoiler alert, later in the story. And we had this whole conversation, as I often do on this podcast, about the trickiness of maintaining consistency in a series, such as characters, tone, and theme, but not consistency in the sense of whether it's a whodunit or not.
 
[00:05:15] Sara: The dead body?
 
[00:05:16] Matty: Yeah, where's the dead body? I'd be curious as we're talking to discuss how consistent one has to be throughout the series and those kinds of things. Any initial thoughts about that?
 
[00:05:26] Sara: Well, I think I'm always very clear in my mysteries, especially the ones that are whodunits. I make sure to introduce the murder and the cast of suspects right from the start, so readers know that these are definitely whodunits and that's the type of story they are. With these other ones, I try to convey through the blurb and the cover that they're not cozy mysteries, but they do have elements of mystery and intrigue in them. Some of the books do involve murder, but not all of them. The murder isn't the main focus. The main focus is, in the beginning, she's trying to find her ex who has disappeared, and she's involved in this more conspiratorial type of plot. That's the primary storyline. Hopefully, the cover, blurb, and the way the book starts convey that it's not a whodunit. It's more about suspense, possibly with intrigue and travel. There are more travel cozies now, but because this one includes travel and international settings, people realize it may not be a Small Town Cozy.
 
The three types of series
 
[00:07:12] Matty: So in your book, "How to Write a Series," you talk about three basic types of series. So what are those?
 
[00:07:17] Sara: Okay, so you've got the multi-protagonist series, which is like this: you have a new protagonist with each book, and the books are linked somehow. This is very common in romance; a lot of times, it'll be like a family or a group of friends, and each book is about a different friend.
 
Then you have a single-protagonist series where you follow one protagonist throughout the series. These can be broken down into two different types. You've got the flat-arc protagonist who doesn't change a whole lot. This is like, for example, James Bond or Mary Poppins; people who don't undergo a significant change throughout the story, but because they're in the story, things change. I mean, if Poirot hadn't been on the Orient Express, it would be a completely different story, right? So because he's there, he causes things to happen, and things change. A lot of times, there will be small character arcs throughout the series, but it's not a massive change.
 
That's what you get in the third type, which I think of as the robust character arc, where you've got a significant change. It's kind of the classic hero's journey. You start out, go through a big adventure or quest, and then at the end, your character has changed, and that type has a natural endpoint.
 
If you think about Harry Potter, he goes through all these adventures, and at the end, there's a resolution, and it's complete, usually marking the end of that series. So, the robust character arc series lends itself well to trilogies, fantasy, and sci-fi. The flat arc, which is more episodic, is seen more in mystery series, especially those that can go on for a long time because they're more episodic. So that's a high-level overview of the different types.
 
[00:09:16] Matty: And I suppose a benefit of that first type with the multi-protagonist is that if you get bored with one, you can switch to another.
 
[00:09:24] Sara: That is right.
 
[00:09:25] Matty: And you could go almost endlessly with that, I suppose.
 
Creating variations in a multi-protagonist series
 
[00:09:28] Sara: and you can keep creating variations. For example, if it's a small town, you can just keep writing about different characters in your town, or you can have new people move in. Or if it's a family, it could be like, well, guess what? We've heard the stories of all the sisters. Now we've got cousins moving in, you know, to explore their stories. So yeah, it can be endless. Focus on getting the first book written before worrying about what type of series it might be a part of
 
[00:09:50] Matty: So in the authors that you speak with and work with, do you find that people usually know what they're going to write as they're writing their first book? Even if they don't know or aren't sophisticated enough to refer to it in the terminology that you use, do they already have a sense?
 
Or are there cases where somebody wants to write a series and they're thinking through it, and are there flats that would make you say, "Oh, I would point you here, I would point you there," based on what they want to accomplish or what they, either creatively or from a business point of view.
 
[00:10:25] Sara: Yeah, I think that's really hard because when you're first starting out, you're just trying to get the book finished. And for me, I read mysteries. I loved mystery. That was what I knew I wanted to write, and that was pretty much what I was familiar with. So I've learned all this and figured it out in my mind. I've categorized these things this way to help me figure things out as I've learned more about genres, different types of stories, story arcs, and characters. So I think a lot of that may come as you learn more. So, I think probably, in the beginning, you're just worried about finishing the first book, but I do think it is good to have a plan. For me, I knew my book was going to be a cozy, and cozies are always part of a series.
 
I mean, it's not like I've never seen cozies. They're not marketed that way anyway. So I knew it was going to be a series, and I had some vague ideas for my first series about the next books, like what the mystery plots could be about. But I did not think at all about my character, and she was a flat character. I look back now and go, "Okay, so she was a flat character." That's why a lot of the advice about the hero's journey, I was like, "This doesn't really work for Cozy." I mean, you can make it work, but she doesn't have a big "aha" moment at the end of book one and then have another "aha" moment at the end of book two. It just doesn't work like that. So yeah, I think a lot of it, you kind of work your way into it. You get the book done, and especially if you know, "Okay, my genre normally has trilogies or normally has five books," then you know that's what readers expect. That's probably what you're going to write toward anyway.
 
Are there trends in flat- versus robust-arc series?
 
[00:12:08] Matty: Do you think there are fashions or trends in that? Because on the surface, a flat arc sounds like an insult. And, I think that if one had been able to go back in time and ask the authors what their plan was, they would probably have said, "Oh, yeah, I don't plan to have this character change over time. Like it was intentional."
 
[00:12:30] Sara: It wasn't like a craft failure on their part. Do you think that's still true? Are either the robust character arc or the flat character arc still desirable among readers? Or is one more popular currently? Well, I think a lot of it depends on the genre because in mystery, readers expect mystery series to go on for like 10, 15, 20 books. They're like, "This is great." I think, and in thriller too, like Jack Reacher, that's, I would say, more of a flat character arc. He doesn't change that much, but that's a long series.
 
And then I think readers like going back to that world if they enjoy whatever world it is, fantasy, mystery, whatever. They enjoy going back to it. There's a comfort and familiarity of going, "Okay, I know who this character is. I know what I'm going to get," even if it's book 17 or whatever. The drawback is you can get bored with that as an author. You may be like, "Huh, I've written everything I can think of in this world or this series or this character."
 
And I do think modern readers expect a little bit of a character arc. Like I was reading the books from the twenties and thirties; those mysteries were basically puzzle mysteries. And you didn't really learn a whole lot about the sleuths' personal lives, just little tidbits here and there, but it wasn't like they changed and grew that much. It was more like, "here's a mystery, can you solve it?"
 
And I feel like readers want more than that now. They want something extra. They need a little bit more. They still want a good puzzle; in my genre, they want a good puzzle, but they want a little bit extra, even if it's an episodic series. I think the through-line for your episodic series, your flat arc, is really what's happening in the main character's life and all the subplots that are going on, all the other relationships. People get heavily invested in those.
 
[00:14:29] Matty: Well, I would think that if you're writing more of a flat arc series, then you have to rely more heavily on the other characters, not the secondary characters, but whoever are kind of the co-protagonists of that particular book. The cast, yeah, exactly, because, like, I'm thinking maybe I shouldn't admit this, but my only exposure to Jack Reacher is I watched one of the TV shows, and I was really more interested in the characters that were surrounding Jack Reacher than I was in Jack Reacher himself, which I thought was very interesting.
 
Now, I'll see if I get angry emails about this, but I was really not compelled by the Jack Reacher character, and then somehow I happened upon an interview with the actor who played him, and he was very engaging and entertaining, you know, seemed like the kind of guy you'd want to go out to a bar for a beer with, and I thought, man, I would have liked it a lot better if more of that had come through in the characterization. But then I said that to someone who's more familiar with the books, and they said, well, yeah, but that really wouldn't be true to the books then; that's not the kind of character he is. So, um, yeah, but I was relying on what was going on with the other characters more to retain my interest in the show.
 
[00:15:39] Sara: Yeah. And I think that happens. I mean, with a flat arc character that's compelling, you're interested in that. Hopefully, you're interested in what's going on with them, but then all the other things that are going on in the world around them, that's the thread that's going to pull people through, I think, because you're not only ready to find out what happens to Poirot or Mary Poppins; you want to know what's going on in the family or the relationships.
 
[00:16:09] Sara: And a lot of times, the flat arc characters, if they have an antagonist, sometimes the antagonist is way more interesting and fun than the protagonists. You think about James Bond and the villains; those are the fun ones that you're like, "Oh, this is interesting, what's going on here?" Sometimes the antagonist can almost overshadow the protagonist in some ways, like Moriarty and Holmes, you know, Moriarty is fascinating, Holmes is fascinating too, but you're interested in Moriarty as well.
 
[00:16:44] Matty: Yeah, well, it does seem as if I'm relying on unreliable memory a little bit for this. Holmes was fascinating right from the get-go because of his idiosyncrasies, and then after a while, you know that he's going to do whatever the things that Holmes does, but then Moriarty gets added to the mix. So, I wonder if Conan Doyle was doing that because he was kind of tired of leaning on Holmes's idiosyncrasies to keep it interesting. He's throwing in this new person to kind of shake things up.
 
[00:17:22] Sara: Yeah, and that's a great way to keep things fresh. As you bring in somebody new, you introduce a different variable. Because after a couple of books, you kind of know what your character is like, your flat character. You know their reactions and their quirky little habits that are entertaining. But after six or seven books, after all these books, or even after three books, maybe you're ready for something new as a writer and a reader.
 
How to extend your series beyond your original plan
 
[00:17:49] Matty: Well, that's kind of a nice lead into one of the other things I wanted to talk about, which is extending your series beyond your original plan. So I guess some of this also goes back to the character arc. Let's say you've started out, and you think you're going to have three books, and then you and the readers continue to be interested. So you're extending it, but now maybe you have to not only adjust the idea for additional books but also the arc.
 
Can you talk a little bit about extending your series beyond the original plan?
 
[00:18:15] Sara: Yeah. So if you have a plan, and you're like, um, like that series I had, the first three books were like a quest. Could she figure out what had happened and unravel this conspiracy? So when that was done, and they were called "On the Run," I was like, okay, if I'm going to extend this, I can't have them being on the run indefinitely. That's just crazy. So I had to figure out something else. Sometimes you have to tie off one arc and then come up with something new. So with that series, I was like, okay, what if she went to work for somebody, and she gets involved in art recovery? So it's an entrepreneurial arc after that. It's like, can she get the job? Can she solve her first case? That's the next arc. Sometimes you have to figure out how your character retires. And then what are they going to do in retirement? Maybe they're a retired police detective or a magician, and they have to figure out what's going to happen next.
 
If you have a transition point, you can maybe find a new jumping-off storyline from that. There's a new challenge somehow. Maybe there's a new rival or competition. Something happens that gives you a new mix of challenges. Maybe they have a backstory you haven't explored, or maybe one of the side characters has a backstory that somehow your character is involved in, and it's a quest, like at the end, instead of the beginning, like my book. So you can just I think, you take your world you have, and you go, what have I not explored in here? And, if it's a town, are there people in the town, are there locations that you haven't delved into? For my 1920s series, it's set in different country homes in England. In the most recent one, "The Eight," I take her to Europe. She goes to Switzerland in the winter, goes to see the Alps, St. Moritz, and all that. So it's just like a whole new area to explore, which will keep you interested as well as the reader, hopefully.
 
Considering how your readers will react to changes in your series
 
[00:20:31] Matty: would be interesting, or important, I guess, to track what about the series your characters really like. Because I'm thinking of, I mean, Conan Doyle tried killing Holmes because he was so tired of it, so that's
 
[00:20:42] Sara: And that was a no-go.
 
[00:20:43] Matty: That was a no-go, but whoops, but I can imagine he might have said, "Oh, you know, I'm so bored with this. I'm going to mix things up. I'm going to have Watson, you know, move to the country, and I'm going to give Holmes a new partner."
 
[00:20:56] Sara: Yeah.
 
[00:20:57] Matty: If people were reading that series in part because they loved Watson, then that was going to be unsuccessful.
 
And so, those are things that apply to both extending a series and addressing the situation where you yourself are becoming bored with it. Understanding what you can change or extend that isn't going to violate the implicit contract you've made with your readers.
 
How do you assess those kinds of considerations?
 
[00:21:21] Sara: Well, for me, whenever I think about it, I know that my readers are reading most of my books because they like the character, they like the setting, and they like the supporting cast. If I'm going to take my character and do something new and different, and maybe she, maybe I'm like, "Oh, she's always been in this little town, but now I want to write a book set in Asia or Europe." If I just take her, my readers are going to be like, "Oh, what's going on with all these other 10 people? I want to know what's happening in their lives." So sometimes that's when you get those books where it's like the whole village goes and travels, you know, and sometimes you can make that happen, but you have to think about why are my readers reading this?
 
And if they want those interactions in a certain location with a lot of people, it's probably smarter to keep the action where it is, instead of trying to go to a new location, unless you're going to do like a complete reset. And sometimes people do that. They'll take a series and basically end it and have your character move to a totally new location and totally start over.
 
I wouldn't recommend that. I think that's kind of risky, but I mean, you could do it. Yeah.
 
[00:22:37] Matty: It's as if you're starting over with a new series, so even if there's a continuing character, the protagonist, you're going to lose some people, but pick up some people. But if you go into it with the expectation that you're not necessarily bringing along all your previous readers, that could be helpful.
 
Using a spin-off to extend a series
 
[00:22:54] Sara: Yeah, I think in that case, it might be smarter to do just a spin-off. Just take a character and, if you want to move your story to a new location or have a new tone, especially, you probably want to have a spin-off, but then they'd be linked, and then your readers who found one would probably try the other one or vice versa. If they start with a spin-off, they might go, "Oh, there's more books. Let me go back and read how it all started."
 
[00:23:25] Matty: When you're thinking about a spin-off, I've occasionally had people say that they like some of the secondary characters in my Ann Kinnear books and ask if I've ever thought about doing a spin-off. When I play it out in my mind, I think some of those characters, they're good in small doses, but I think a whole book of that particular character would be
 
[00:23:45] Sara: might be a little much.
 
[00:23:46] Matty: A little much.
 
Spin-offs are for more than just characters
 
[00:23:46] Matty: Yeah. So when you're assessing possible characters for a spinoff or maybe it's not just characters. Can you describe when you think of spin-offs, are there other flavors than spinning off a character, like a location, for example?
 
[00:23:59] Sara: Yeah, I would say you can do the character. You could take a side character, you know, and give them their whole story, but that is the problem. Maybe it's not ideal for a protagonist. Maybe they're better in a side character role. But then, like you could, like I did the location thing where it's this village in modern times, contemporary, and then this is the village in the past.
 
So that way you're linking the village, at least.
 
[00:24:25] Matty: Yeah, that's very cool. I've never heard that before, but that's super cool.
 
[00:24:28] Sara: Yeah, and I don't know how much read-through I get from that, but I mean, I figure it's a way that if people are interested, they might pick up the other series just because of the name. Other ways you could link or spin off would be like, I would think this might work in romance, like maybe you would have a shop or a store, and you would have different, or a hotel. They do that a lot. You know, like you have different stories with different people checking in and out. You know, like you could
 
[00:24:56] Matty: The Love Boat.
 
[00:24:57] Sara: Yes. Fantasy Island. There we go.
 
[00:24:59] Matty: Fantasy Island, exactly.
 
[00:25:01] Sara: Yeah.
 
[00:25:03] Matty: And if you're assessing a character as a spinoff, are there any either green flags or red flags that would say this is likely to be a good or not such a good idea?
 
[00:25:13] Sara: Well, I guess it depends on what type of series you're writing. So if you're doing a flat arc, do you have enough story around that person? Can you create enough story around that person to make it interesting and make it more than one book if you want a series? And if it's a robust character, like what characteristics, what change are they going to go through that's going to make it compelling that readers will want to read?
 
Because I do know what you're saying, like some of those characters are so fun to write as the comic relief or whatever, but then can you sustain a whole book or a whole series with them being the comic relief? And then are you going to bring in somebody else to be the straight man? You know, like you have to kind of think through these things down the line and can you do that for three, four, or five books?
 
Supplementing a series with short stories
 
[00:26:02] Matty: Well, one of the things you said that I love was that you write short stories, and whenever I hear short stories, I'm always immediately intrigued. And I think that's a great way to explore that. So one of the characters that people often say they would like to see in a spinoff is named Garrick Masser. He's in the Ann Kinnear novels. And basically, he's in there to be both Ann's mentor in the early books and then her kind of both colleague and competitor in later books. And he's very gruff and eccentric and won't eat anything but bread and drink water when he's in public, but then someone's in his house one time and notices that there's a pizza box in the garbage can. So, that would be fun for a short story, but not, I think, for a novel-length work.
 
Talk a little bit about how you've used short stories in conjunction with your series.
 
[00:26:47] Sara: Well, in my Murder on Location series, the one that's set in contemporary times about the location scout, I feel like it has kind of run its course. I've told the story I wanted to convey between the characters, and it's essentially done. However, my readers are like, "Oh, can you do something else? We want more, you know?" I mean, that's a good thing to have, but I just can't think of a story arc and a plot for a whole novel. But I did have some small ideas like, "Oh, I could do this." So I've written some short stories that continue the story, like taking little baby steps.
 
And then, recently with my first Kickstarter, I had an idea. I was looking for a short story, and I thought, "What if I turn this into letters?" Because I've seen some mysteries in the mail or these letter subscriptions that you can get. So I thought, "What if I turned it into letters from my main character? She gets involved in this mystery, and it's not big enough for a novel." I wrote eight letters, and that was part of the Kickstarter. They could sign up to get a special edition hardcover, the letters, or both. So they were mailed to you over eight weeks. Each one is like an installment, kind of like a mini-series, you know, like an episodic story. Here's what's happening in this town. This is what happened. This is the mystery. I'll write more when I know more, you know, and then the next one comes a week later. And it's a fun way for me to try a different writing style. I've always written long, so writing short is a challenge. But somehow, writing the letters made it easier and a totally different style of writing.
 
So, to me, that's a short form that I can explore. The first one was about my main character going to visit her eccentric aunt, who keeps peacocks and such. One of her peacocks had gone missing, and she wanted her niece, who's good at solving problems, to come find it. She's like, "This is not what I do, and I don't know how to do this." It's kind of funny, and you know, it could fit into a shorter form.
 
[00:29:06] Matty: Yeah, I have found that I'll have ideas. Sometimes I'll get interested in something that's not thematic, but something that's just topical, maybe the opposite. The example I always use is in 2019, I went on a cruise with my husband and some friends, and we cruised around the Hawaiian islands. Then we cruised from Hawaii to Vancouver. I got fascinated with the idea of what happens if somebody goes overboard. I wanted to write a story about what happens if somebody goes overboard, but I didn't want to base a whole novel on it.
 
So I wrote a short story called "Sea of Troubles" about that, just like four or 5,000 words, maybe 6,000 words about exploring that. But it was a topic, not a theme. When I'm thinking of novel-length works, it's more about how someone balances privacy and celebrity or how someone recovers from the guilt they feel about an act in their past. Those are more thematic, not topical.
 
[00:30:06] Sara: Right. And then a novel that's, you get to really explore all those levels, and it's much deeper. I think like the short story can be deep in a way, but it's so short. It lets you hit that situation and kind of, it's almost cathartic, you know, like you've got these ideas and you're like, "Oh, I want to write about this, but I don't really want to write a whole book or a whole series on this one thing or this one situation." So yeah, it makes perfect sense.
 
Using a short story to experiment with a series concept.
 
[00:30:38] Matty: And, sort of to loop back to the whole spinoff idea, a short story can be nice because you could experiment with a character. And I think that people would enjoy, you know, a short story of Garrick Masser, the character I was talking about from the Ann Kinnear ones, but I think it would confirm my belief that a novel like the work with Garrick is not going to be good.
 
[00:30:57] Sara: Right. Yeah. It lets you kind of try things out.
 
[00:31:01] Matty: And I did have the experience recently of having written the three Lizzy Ballard thrillers, and then I was working on the fourth Lizzy Ballard thriller, and I realized that a logistical problem I had is that the thing that happens to Lizzy Ballard after her last scene in book three could be days, weeks, or even months later, but the thing that happens to the antagonist at the end of book three is going to happen seconds after the end of the book.
 
And so I was really struggling with how to handle that without having the first five chapters of book four be about the antagonist, which I didn't want, and so I ended up writing a novella, kind of a long, short story, short novella, length work that is just taking the antagonist from the end of book three to the beginning of book four, where their chronologies match up.
 
And that's one where I truly love this antagonist, Louise Mortensen, for anyone who has read the Lizzy Ballard books, but I'm not sure other people would want an entire novel about the bad guy, but I had a lot of fun with it.
 
[00:32:01] Sara: Yeah. But that's a good solution because you get this. Any of your readers who are very into that can read that and it will bridge for them. Yeah. I think that's a great solution.
 
[00:32:13] Matty: And I think from a marketing point of view, it'll be sort of a nice tease as I'm leading up to the launch of book four. I can be offering that as something too.
 
[00:32:21] Sara: Yeah.
 
Dealing with the challenges of being locked into your story world.
 
[00:32:22] Matty: To bring people forward, one of the other things you address in your book is how do you deal with the problems that result from being locked into a story world? And I think this is, we probably kind of talked about this a little bit about expanding things in a way that's going to be interesting for you. Any other tips there that we haven't hit yet?
 
[00:32:38] Sara: Well, for me, I'm a high input person, so if I can just find something that's related to the story world, like the Jane Austen Country House Location Scout, if I can just find a book about it, right? Yeah. Well, thank you. A location scout or about country houses and just start reading it, or you know, watch a documentary or something.
 
I will get ideas from that. The same thing in the 1920s. If I read some biographies, if I read about something that happened during that time period, like how they traveled, and I mean, that will fire ideas for me. So that may be something that would help other people, for me.
 
And maybe look at a theme and say, "Okay, so this first part of the series is about X, what else can we explore?" So, maybe it's a very strong romantic subplot in the beginning, and now you want to transition to something else. You know, you just have to think about, I mean, it could be something, like revenge; something happens, and you explore the possibility of revenge or the push-pull of, "Do I want revenge? Will revenge help?" You know, things like that. I'm a murder mystery enthusiast, so, of course, I go to revenge and dark themes like that, but it could be anything, you know? So sometimes it's like maybe a theme could help you figure out something else you could explore.
 
[00:34:02] Matty: Yeah, I think even rereading your old books can help because I'm realizing that the way this has played out is that Ann Kinnear is a woman who can communicate with the dead. I mentioned in book one that her parents both died in a car crash when she was in college to emphasize the fact that it's her and her brother.
 
She has, at the beginning, a very insular world. It's basically her, her brother, and her brother's husband, and I didn't want her to have parents or another kind of support structure beyond that. But then I was working on, I don't know, book six or something like that, and I thought, you know, it's weird that a woman who can talk to dead people, we've never addressed this question about, has she ever tried to contact her parents? So I started putting that in; I needed a subplot for Book six because normally, Ann doesn't get involved in a case until later, so I need something else going on to introduce her early, and she's working on that, and so I started using that as a subplot, and then I thought, you know, if you have the protagonist trying to contact her dead mother, that's probably not a story by itself.
 
[00:35:11] Sara: And isn't that funny? It's something that you didn't explore early on, but it's something that, as you're describing it now, I'm like, of course, people would be curious about that, and they would be interested in that. So, you know, sometimes just going over what drives your characters and motivates them and things that they're involved with can give you new ideas too.
 
[00:35:36] Matty: So we've talked about ways that we can reignite our own interest and readers' interest, but at some point, it probably has to come to an end. What are the signs that might be happening, and how do you do that gracefully?
 
[00:35:48] Sara: So this is something I've struggled with a lot because, like I said, mystery readers expect a series to just continue. They want it to go on forever, and I can't write every series forever. So for me, I thought if I become bored with the characters, if you're bored and you don't want to write the books, if you don't want to go back to those characters, then that might be a sign that it's time to wrap things up.
 
If you're out of ideas on how to make it interesting, if you're like, "Okay, I've written about all the stuff I want to write about with this character." I heard one author one time say she knew she was out of ideas when she was writing the amnesia book. She was like, "Okay, if I'm going to amnesia, then basically it's time to end this thing."
 
And I was like, "Okay, that is kind of..."
 
[00:36:38] Matty: It was all a dream!
 
[00:36:39] Sara: That's right. Yeah.
 
[00:36:40] Matty: Then it's time to call it quits.
 
[00:36:42] Sara: Yeah. And then I feel like if there's no more potential for character growth, even in your flat art characters, usually you've got some challenges, some small things that are happening. And if you've kind of reached the end of what you want to write about or what you can explore with that character, then, you know, it's probably time to move on.
 
And for me, I was very worried about how my readers would react. So there's like the question of, "How will readers react?" And then there's the concern of, "How will it impact my writing, like my income?" Because if you have a workhorse series that, you know, if I release a book, I'll make this much money, that can be stressful to decide to end that. So there's a lot of anxiety around it that I don't think people really talk about.
 
So what I did was I've done two different things. One time I just kind of quietly stepped away and just didn't really mention the series and started emphasizing my other series. Then another time I said, "Hey, this series is ending." And I think for me, that was better because my readers weren't constantly going, "Oh, is there more?" So I just said, "This series is done. I've pretty much told the story I want to tell, and these characters, they're happy and they're content. They're not discovering any more dead bodies. So we can move on."
 
And I told my readers that I didn't have any more ideas that would support a novel. And I had so many nice emails from people saying, "Oh, thank you for letting us know. I appreciate that you're not going to basically flog a dead horse." And I was like, "Okay, that's nice."
 
And then for marketing, I tried to, what I've learned to do is if you can link your new series, if you're writing a new series, if you can link it somehow to the one you're closing off, that's smart. I didn't always do that. But if you can find some way, like through setting or character or some story world, like magic, if you're using some sort of magic, if the magic can continue in another person or setting, you know, then you can keep part of that element going to pull readers onto the next series.
 
[00:38:55] Matty: And I suppose if your goal is to write one very long series and keep your engagement and the reader's engagement, you could go into it knowing, "I'm going to start out with protagonist A, and I'm going to have secondary protagonist B be a big part, but clearly secondary, but then I'm going to have B's role become larger and larger, so I could kind of fade out A if I get tired of A, and now I can switch it, so it's the 'Life on a Spaceship' series and you're moving from the person who's the captain to the person who's the first officer, I don't know, but having that plan to say, 'Oh, I'm going to have somebody in the wings whose story and character really does support them being, moving into the A position.'
 
[00:39:35] Sara: Yeah. And I'm seeing more and more books, especially in the mystery genre, that are ensemble cast. And I think that would be a way you could maybe start out with the focus on one character, but you have, you know, four or five other characters that your readers are just as interested in. And, you know, like you can kind of, they can wax and wane as the story goes, and you can highlight somebody's story in maybe book three or book seven that didn't have as big a role in book one. And that can give you different. And, you know, it can just keep you interested, and the readers interested, too.
 
[00:40:10] Matty: And I think another thing to consider is, are you tired of this for all time, or are you just tired of it now? Because with my two series, I wrote two Ann Kinnear novels, then I wrote three Lizzy Ballard thrillers, and then I wrote four more Ann Kinnear novels. By the time I'd gotten to the sixth Ann Kinnear book, I was missing the Lizzy characters.
 
And part of it was that I was missing the characters because they do become like your friends. And part of it, too, was that I realized that my books had gotten, well, I don't really want to use the word "cozier," but cozier and cozier, shading toward the cozy end more with each book. I was really looking forward to writing some kick-ass fight scenes and letting people get stabbed and things like that. I thought, I just need to switch back to Lizzy because her world is a little more action-packed. I just needed that as a refresher. I'm going to be going back to the Ann Kinnear books. But if you have something you can switch to, if you can leave one series at a satisfying point but open so that if you want to go back to it, you can, and then switch to something else, then you might go back to it refreshed.
 
And I think, as you were saying, letting people know, letting your readers know kind of what's going on because I think they appreciate that. They not only appreciate that you're taking the time to let them know, but they kind of enjoy the glimpse behind the scenes of what's going on in a writer's mind and in a writer's life.
 
[00:41:36] Sara: Yeah. Yeah. I think there's a lot to be said for, like you're talking about switching tones and stuff. It's almost like a palate cleanser. Okay, I'm going to have this one. I'm going to leave it open in case I want to come back to it, but it's on hiatus right now. I'm working on this. And then when you're ready, you can go back to the other.
 
And I totally understand about writing super cozy. That's why my second series that I wrote was just like, I had everything in it. The first series I wrote had a mom, and she had little kids, so she had to be, you know, she had little kids and had to be, I didn't want to be one of those writers who put kids in danger as a story element.
 
So I was always having to shuffle all the kids off to the babysitter. So my next series, I was like, she's not going to have any kids. She's going to be impulsive. She's going to do whatever she wants because I wanted that change, you know, to explore something different.
 
[00:42:29] Matty: So interesting. Well, Sara, this has been such a fun conversation. Thank you so much for joining me to have the conversation. And please let everyone know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you do online.
 
[00:42:40] Sara: My website is SaraRosett.com. My books, you can find them for sale at Sararosettebooks.com. And then if you're interested in the website, it's the "Wish I'd Known Them" podcast with Jami Albright. And if you're a mystery reader, there's the Mystery Books podcast.
 
[00:42:56] Matty: Great. Thank you so much.
 
[00:42:58] Sara: Thank you for having me. It's been a lot of fun.

Episode 208 - Mistakes Writers Make about Bladed Weapons with Teel James Glenn

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Teel James Glenn discusses how he got his start as a stuntman and how "the will to push through" physical challenges enabled him to follow his dream; the different varieties of swords; the fact that your first service is to the story; how opponents will never be exactly equal; the fact that tough people don't pose; how to achieve a realistic portrayal of bladed weapon wounds and guidelines for realistic recovery times; and examples of  well-done current-day knife and sword fight movie scenes.

Teel James Glenn has killed or been killed hundreds of times—on stage and screen—as he has traveled the world for forty-plus years as a stuntman, swordmaster, storyteller, bodyguard, actor, and haunted house barker. He is proud to have studied sword under Errol Flynn’s last stunt double, and has made hundreds of appearances in Renaissance festivals, soap operas, and feature films, including having been beaten up by Hawk on the Spenser for Hire TV show. He has also published dozens of novels, and his poetry and stories have been printed in over two hundred magazines including Weird Tales, Mystery, Pulp Adventures, and more. His novel A COWBOY IN CARPATHIA: A BOB HOWARD ADVENTURE won best novel 2021 in the Pulp Factory Award. He is also the winner of the 2012 Pulp Ark Award for Best Author.

Episode Links

Author website: TheUrbanSwashbuckler.com
Facebook profile: Teel James Glenn
Instagram profile: @teeljamesglenn
LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/teel-james-glenn-6a334b1/
Blsky.: @Teelglenn

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to the Indie Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Teel James Glenn, or TJ. Hey, TJ, how are you doing?
 
[00:00:07] Teel: I'm doing fine. Very nice to meet you and everyone viewing.
 
[00:00:10] Matty: Oh, we are happy to have you here. And to give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Teel James Glenn has killed or been killed hundreds of times on stage and screen as he has traveled the world for 40 plus years as a stuntman, swordmaster, storyteller, bodyguard, actor, and haunted house barker. He's proud to have studied sword under Errol Flynn's Last Stunt Double, and he has made hundreds of appearances in Renaissance festivals, soap operas, and feature films, including having been beaten up by Hawk on the Spencer for Hire TV show.
 
He has also published dozens of novels, and his poetry and stories have been printed in over 200 magazines, including Weird Tales, Mystery, Pulp Adventure, and more. His novel, "A Cowboy in Carpathia," a Bob Howard adventure, won Best Novel in 2021 in the Pulp Factory Award, and he is also the winner of the 2012 Pulp Arc Award for Best Author.
 
I invited TJ on the podcast to talk about what's going to become one of a series of "Mistakes Writers Make" episodes.
 
[00:01:06] Matty: And we're going to be talking about mistakes writers make about fight scenes and how to avoid them. This is going to join other entries in this series, which are: Police Roles with Frank Zaffiro, Forensic Psychiatry with Susan Hatters Friedman, P. I. s with Patrick Hoffman, The F. B. I. with Jerry Williams. First Responders with Ken Fritz, Coroners with Jennifer Grazer Dornbusch, Police Procedure with Bruce Coffin, and Firearms with Chris Grahl of TacticQuill. That set of podcast episodes became so popular that I finally created a little listening list on theindyauthor.com/podcast. So if you're writing crime fiction or a topic that includes any of those topics, you'll be able to find all those "Mistakes Writers Make" and how to avoid them all in one place.
 
[00:02:00] Matty: And so we're going to be adding to that list, "Mistakes Writers Make About Fight Scenes," and I'd like to start out asking TJ, what got you started as a stuntman?
 
[00:02:13] Teel: I was thinking about that actually last night very specifically. I was a very sickly kid. I couldn't take gym. I couldn't do any sports. Asthma. Sickly. I looked like a potato with pipe cleaners stuck in me. And when I was 15, I went to a Phil Suling comic convention. I was a reader of comic books, of course, and I saw chapter two of the "Adventures of Captain Marvel" movie serial, made in 1941, and the stunt work in it by a guy named Dave Sharpe. The editing and shooting were so amazing; you really did believe a man could fly. You really did see guys flipping around. And I went, "I want to do that." I started making Super 8 movies in high school. I read every single thing I could on stunts and movie serials and how they did it. I taught myself how to do stair falls at my high school with washcloths wrapped with ace bandages around my elbows and knees on the marble stairs, still wearing my glasses because I couldn't see otherwise. I learned to do high falls off of garage roofs and how to build box rigs and all of it from reading it, seeing any behind-the-scenes footage I could. And then, of course, I went to art school. But the last night in art school before I was supposed to graduate, I had a party who was auditioning people for a film, and on a lark, because I knew about film and I'd been making my own little stupid Super 8 movies, Captain Marvel, Rocketman.
 
I went, I got a part in it, and then he needed somebody to choreograph and storyboard it and to choreograph a fight. I knew how they did it in the movies, so that got me started. Once I did that, I ended up getting a lead in the movie, although he lost the equipment halfway through, and the film never got finished. But that led me to other movies, and then I thought, I got to get some training. So I was researching a book I was writing that had a sword fight, and I took a friend of mine who had studied with Ralph Faulkner in California, who was the swordmaster in a lot of the Errol Flynn movies. He said, "Hey, there's this guy teaching stage combat in the city. Do you want to come with me to the class?" I went, "Heck yeah!" So I took Swashbuckling 101, and the minute I held a sword in my hand, I knew that's what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. It was like a heavenly choir with lights shining on me. From that point, I started to train to be able to hold the sword, move, and breathe, and I never looked back. I studied with my first instructor for three to four years. When he started a Renaissance Fair, I was one of the instructors. Then I auditioned for other Renaissance Fairs and ultimately ended up doing 60 Renaissance Fairs, either as the fight choreographer, the assistant choreographer, the jouster, or, for the last bunch of years, I participated in a story show. What was cool about that was I did storytelling with all the voices and characters, and my daughter joined me when she was eight.
 
[00:05:17] Matty: Oh, cool.
 
[00:05:18] Teel: Every year we did at least one Renaissance Fair together for a weekend. Where she would beat me up with a quarterstaff at the beginning of the show because everyone likes to see the big guy beaten up. The last time we did it was just before she went off to college, and she was six foot three.
 
[00:05:38] Matty: Wow.
 
[00:05:39] Teel: It wasn't funny anymore. It was just an old guy fighting a young woman. It wasn't the giant fighting a little girl. So she did the last quarterstaff fight on her knees, so it looked funny. And she still beat me, of course. So, I mean, that's it. From learning stage combat, I ended up getting parts in low-budget movies, soap operas, where they needed a big guy who could be the tough guy and throw a punch. So I would often get hired as an actor, and then they would add stunts, or they would hire me as a stuntman and realize I could act, so they would start beefing up my part. But many of my roles were like, "You can't come in here," and then there'd be a fight. That was the main part of my career.
 
[00:06:24] Matty: I have to ask what happened between the asthmatic child that looked like a potato with pipe cleaners. Did something happen that enabled you to take part in those activities, or did taking part in those activities help address it?
 
[00:06:38] Teel: That's it. I had the will to push through it now because there was something I believed in. I don't care about sports; I still don't. So the idea of training to run around a field and throw a pigskin, why would you do that? But training to be able to sustain a sword fight and do a Shakespearean monologue all in a show? Yes, I would train for that. I used to live at the top of a hill, and you'd have to climb up stone stairs in a park for my stage combat class, which was on Saturday mornings. I would literally have to crawl up the stairs. At the end of the class, I could not function.
 
I still carry an inhaler with me to this day. I'm still asthmatic, not as bad as I was as a child, fortunately. One of the first fight choreographers, Jim Manley, who hired me as his assistant, was severely asthmatic; he always had his inhaler with him. And I mean, I can't run a block, but I can do a fight. I can jump off a building, and my martial arts, by the end of a martial arts class, I would be almost like a non-functional lump. But I'd made it through alive, and that was always an achievement for me. So it never went away. My reason for fighting it was stronger than the actual disease.
 
[00:07:58] Matty: That's a great story. We had sort of come up with a couple of categories about which we wanted to discuss the idea of mistakes writers make about fight scenes. We've talked about bladed weapons already a couple of times. So I'd like to start with that one. What are some mistakes writers make? And if you have any good or bad examples from movies people might be familiar with, that's always a fun way to illustrate it.
 
[00:08:23] Teel: Yeah, I almost always end up using movie references because most people haven't read obscure Raphael Sabatini books or whatever. First thing is when people say "sword," there are hundreds of types of swords, different weights, and each sword has a different purpose. When people are thinking, for instance, of the Conan movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger, I will always and forever say that it was junk because Milius got his samurai instructor to teach Arnold how to use a sword, which makes no sense because samurai swords and broadswords don't work anywhere like each other. It would be the equivalent of having a bicyclist teach someone how to do motocross racing because they're completely separate. So everything he does with the broadsword is essentially wrong, and he moves like such a truck that anyone should have been able to kill him immediately.
 
On the other hand, you see a movie like Ladyhawke with Rutger Hauer, William Hobbs, who choreographed it, was the swordmaster in the 70s, 60s, 70s, and into the 80s. He did the Three and Four Musketeers with Michael York, the Mel Gibson Hamlet, and the Cyrano with Gepard. So he would study the specific weapon and teach you how to use that weapon. The broadsword techniques in Ladyhawke are real broadsword techniques, and you can see he moves completely differently. And, you know, and it really wouldn't have been a bad thing if they said, "We got a samurai guy, okay, we'll give him a curved sword." That's why Sandahl Bergman actually looks like she knows what she's doing, aside from being a dancer. She had a curved sword, so she was actually doing curved sword techniques. Samurai swords cut on the draw; they don't cut on the extension, so it's a completely different way of cutting. So, again, it's a stupid little nuance, but it's the kind of thing that drives me sane.
 
[00:10:34] Matty: The scene that this reminds me of is, and I'm not coming up with the name of the movie, but there was a movie with Liam Neeson.
 
[00:10:40] Teel: Rob Roy.
 
[00:10:43] Matty: Rob Roy, and there's that scene where he has what I guess is a broadsword. You can correct my terminology.
 
[00:10:48] Teel: A Scottish broadsword, Basket Hill broadsword, and he's fighting the guy.
 
[00:10:51] Matty: He's fighting a guy.
 
[00:10:54] Teel: With a small sword.
 
[00:10:55] Matty: Yeah, like a fencing thing almost.
 
[00:10:58] Teel: They were contemporary, same time. The Basket Hill broadsword was basically a war weapon, and the walking sword or court sword that ... He's always playing horrible, horrible human beings, and he's also really tiny. But he was using a contemporary sword of what the noblemen would have worn on their hip while walking around. They call it a walking sword. In that fight, he would have killed Liam Neeson in about 20 seconds because he had the lunge. The lunge gives you extension. Also, those basket-hilted swords, Rob Roy, whom Liam Neeson was playing, fought 60 duels in his life and never lost a duel. His last duel was when he was 63 years old, which, at that point, was old. We've pushed the extension of things. They wanted to make Liam Neeson the underdog, but in fact, if Liam Neeson's sword had ever actually contacted the court sword, it would have snapped it in half like a toothpick. So they had to work really hard to make you think the other guy was going to win, whereas if he'd gotten a lunge in that fight, the way it was choreographed, Liam Neeson was dead. In reality, the guy with the big hacking sword with longer arms would have won and gotten him on the first cut. If you miss while you're down there, the guy just lunges, and you're done. There's historical evidence of samurai swords against rapiers in Portuguese against bandits in the China Seas, and the Portuguese always won because a cutting sword requires an arc. A lunging sword does not. So while you're doing this, he's going like a sewing needle, and you're done.
 
[00:12:41] Matty: A That's an interesting, I mean, I imagine that in Rob Roy, they fussed with the reality because they needed that scene to extend longer.
 
[00:12:59] Teel: Yes, absolutely. And, yeah.
 
[00:13:00] Matty: Are there tips you can share that say, even like, how can someone do a realistic sword scene but extend it to extend the drama of the situation?
 
[00:13:10] Teel: If you ever see any of these commentaries on YouTube where they'll have, you know, a Swordmaster looks at a real thing and tells you, you know, the one thing all of them will say is that most fights, even if they last a long time, it's because nobody's doing anything. As soon as the blades start touching, the fight's over real quick because it is a case of who makes the first mistake. One of the things I write, I have a sword and sorcery series, and in any of my stuff, if I talk about people fighting with swords, I talk about the type of sword. Because certain swords have an innate advantage over other swords. And because of that, you then have to say, I want my hero to have a disadvantage so the other guy will have an arm that's three inches longer or my hero will have a stiff shoulder because he fell off his horse, to give them a disadvantage with that.
 
But in terms of, it's a case of just looking at the weapons and going, how is it used? And always, it's not the weapon, it's the individual using it. If somebody is skilled, the biggest problem I always see is people pick up a sword in some movie or in some book against someone who's actually trained in that weapon and somehow win. It doesn't work that way. You, even when they were training for combat, you trained with a weapon which was as close to the real weapon you were using as possible, even to the point where in Hamlet's time when they talk about foiled swords, they would take the real swords and wrap it in metal foil and stick a golf ball on the end of it. Because you wanted the actual weight of your weapon in your hand. If it's lighter, you're not going to learn how to use your weapon correctly. The familiarity with it often is the answer.
 
Now, a good swordsman is supposed to be able to use multiple weapons, but you always have your favorite; everybody. It's like everyone even has their favorite chair. You know, you get used to certain things. With any weapon, that weapon, even when I'm teaching stage combat or choreographing shows, I assign specific stage swords to specific actors and say, "That's yours," because every sword's balance is a little different. The weight of it is a little different. For instance, if you hand me a sword that I've never used before, and I'm immediately in battle, I really am not going to be familiar with how it moves. And that would be a disadvantage, which you can turn, as the protagonist gets used to it, perhaps. It gives you a nice disadvantage, even with a skilled fighter.
 
The other thing that drives me nuts, this is just the thing about cover artists and comic book artists. You don't switch your sword from one hand to the other unless you're Cornel Wilde, because you always have a strong side. Cornel Wilde in the old movies, the big trick at the end of every movie, he'd get stabbed in the right arm, and he'd have to do the final fight with his left hand. He was really a left-handed guy. He had to learn to do right-handed when he was competing for the Olympics. And so this was actually his strong side, but he learned to use the right. And 99 percent of people, or 98%, are right-handed. So a left-handed fencer always has an advantage because people are not used to going up against it.
 
[00:16:51] Matty: It makes me think of the scene in The Princess Bride, of course.
 
[00:16:55] Teel: Yes, yes. Believe it or not, that's the other thing. In the text, they go, "Ah, I see you've learned your Capo Ferro, ah, but I will use my Marozzo against you on Uneven Ground." They quote all these specific techniques, and they don't use a single one of them in the movie. The writer took the time to research them so they actually used real techniques. If you choreograph the fight that's in the book, it's a real fight.
 
[00:17:19] Matty: Oh, interesting.
 
[00:17:20] Teel: Using real techniques. Goldman did his research. But for the movie, they said, "Now we just want it to look like an Errol Flynn fight." So they had the dialogue, but they weren't doing Marozzo or Capo Ferro.
 
[00:17:30] Matty: That's very disappointing.
 
Your first service is to the story
 
[00:17:32] Teel: You know what? I still, it's still one of my favorite movies of all time. Because when you're choreographing fights, the first service is to the story. The second, but when you're doing it with real people, the story. And then if you're lucky, you can educate a little. You know, but when you're just writing it, it's always got to serve the story first. You know, and you can always fudge it if you don't know what to do with it. You could make it impressionistic. The feelings of the fight, without actually describing.
 
[00:18:04] Matty: Well, one of the things that I was thinking that's kind of related to that is that when you were describing, and people who are just listening maybe can pop over to YouTube and watch, but you were sort of illustrating why someone who is swinging a sword is at a disadvantage over someone who's thrusting a sword. We're using different terminology, but that's very apparent. Like, if you were watching a movie scene, I think even someone who knew nothing about swordplay would understand that, but when you're describing it, that would be hard to convey in writing. Do you have any tips for that?
 
[00:18:37] Teel: Honestly, I don't think it is because you can literally say, "I looked at him, and he had a curved war sword. That meant he had to swing it. I was lucky. Mine was straight. If I could avoid that first swing, I could stab him." I've actually had a scene in one of my books where two friends are fighting different bad guys. One guy has a two-handed sword and he's against a bunch of straight-handed people, and the other one, she's fighting a guy with a curved sword, she has a straight sword. So, literally, in the middle of the fight, they switch so that it goes straight to straight, curve to curve, to even it out a little. Because she had an advantage with the guy with the curved sword, but her buddy had none. She's also the better swordsman than him, so it makes sense she could take on the two guys with straight swords, and he would take on the one guy with the curve. You can build it in as part of the jeopardy for your hero, you know?
 
Size matters
 
[00:19:39] Teel: Also, the length of the sword matters. I'm sorry, size matters. If your hero is a petite woman, and even if she's an expert swordswoman, as my character Irina is, she has a sword that's scaled for her body, and so she will have less length than some goon she goes up against who's six inches, eight inches taller than her, who therefore has longer arms, and therefore, even if he had the same length sword, had an advantage. She has to make up for it by being more fleet and trying to get inside his range so that her blade is effective. So you really, there are a lot of factors you can use to even the fights up or uneven them against your hero.
 
The other thing is there's an old saying that the greatest swordsman in France is not afraid of the second greatest; they're afraid of the worst. And... So literally, someone who has no idea what they're doing can be on their side. They can just swing wildly, hit the right spot. I mean, how many times have you accidentally hit somebody's funny bone when you were reaching for something? You know, that could happen with a sword, to hit that one spot. There's a very funny story about when... if you've ever seen the movie The Court Jester with Danny Kaye, there's a scene in it where he's going up against Basil Rathbone, who was an excellent real fencer and a great stage combat fencer. But Danny's character is hypnotized to be the greatest with a blade. Unless you do this, then he's unhypnotized and he's a complete bumbling oaf. In the sequences where he's the greatest with the blade, Danny Kaye learned it so quickly and so well that the fight choreographer had to double Basil Rathbone because he couldn't keep up with the speed of Danny Kaye. On the other hand, there's a sequence where he's out in a courtyard, and he goes to Rathbone, "Your life's not worth that." Huh? Huh? Huh? And he's suddenly confused, and there's a scene where he's running around screaming, throwing the sword in the air, and you can see Basil Rathbone doing this. Rathbone said, "Neither one of us knew what he was going to do," and it was the only time I've ever been terrified with a sword in my hand because he could have literally stabbed him. He could have killed him. He was just running around being wild and crazy. So that can work too.
 
Opponents will never be exactly equal.
 
[00:21:57] Teel: You can work to have the guy you're up against. If you do something insane, they'll be like, "What are you doing?" Because also people who train in a style, and this is what Bruce Lee was against, when you train in one style, you're used to certain answers to certain movements. I do this, he always does this. Well, if you go up and complete a different style you've never seen before, you have no idea what they're going to do. If you, you do this and you expect them to do that, but they do this, suddenly, it throws your whole world out of kilter, which is why, In a lot of cultures, you would go around training in different schools, because everybody had their secret, vota secreta, their secret move, and each school would teach it, and you'd try to stay there long enough to learn their secret, and then you'd go on to the next school to learn their secret, because in a fight, you, you, you're not going to face a peer, you're going to face a peer, maybe. But you're not going to face an equal. No fight is ever equal, even if you both have the same training, the same body, the same skill level. one of you is going to be more motivated, or one of you is going to be tired from not getting enough sleep. So it's always, you might be equivalent, but it's never going to be exactly equal.
 
[00:23:43] Teel: That also works to give tension. When I have characters who are heroes and have had real training, I have to make sure they don't just Mary Sue their way through a story. You know, they can't walk into a room and kill everybody in the room like John Wick. Otherwise, there's no tension. Nobody really worries that John Wick is going to die; it's just about how he's going to kill them. It becomes like the Columbo of action films. You know he's going to win; you just want to see how.
 
[00:24:05] Matty: That makes me think of another interesting dramatic twist, which is the calm, cool, and collected combatant against the frantic, desperate combatant. And you can play that either way. You could say, you know, because he was frantic and panicked, he lost the fight. Or because he was frantic and panicked and had nothing to lose and was perhaps not trained. What you were saying before about it.
 
[00:24:30] Teel: That's a real thing. They train you in martial arts. The reason they want you to fight calmly and not fight angrily or excitedly is because when you have adrenaline in your system, you have the fight or flight response. Because of that, your body thinks, "Okay, I'm going to need energy to run away." It starts shutting down finer motor nerves, cuts off power to certain things. So you're, the old trope about somebody not being able to get their key in the door when the bad guy's coming after them, that's true because when you're in a frightened state, you lose fine motor nerves. So one of the reasons for martial arts repetition, and swords are martial arts, as are guns really, is you want to build a sense of, "This is the way you do it, and you're calm about it." You don't fight angrily, and you don't fight scared. You put that away, and you get angry or afraid after the fight is over.
 
One of the nice things, if anybody's ever read Modesty Blaise, or maybe I'm giving my age away, they were great books. One of the first true female heroes, who actually Emma Peel was somewhat modeled on, and one of her character traits is she will be phenomenal through a fight, very level-headed. Afterwards, she falls apart hysterically, but only in her friend Willie's arms. That's her complete release. She literally bottles all the emotion, and at the end, she explodes. It's her own way to deal with her own PTS. And he wrote this in the early '60s, before there was a real understanding of PTS. So I give much kudos to him, Peter O'Donnell, the writer. But you can really use the craziness because you will do things and take chances that no sane fighter would do.I had a friend, the first time he was in France, they still have rapier dagger fighting as a competition. And now it's been revived with HEMA, but back in the '70s, HEMA wasn't doing that stuff yet.
 
[00:26:08] Matty: And what is HEMA?
 
[00:26:22] Teel: Oh, Historical European Martial Arts. It was an answer to the huge explosion of martial arts, which everyone thinks is everything. They really are mostly referring to... Asian, but there's, I mean, the European martial arts are absolutely sophisticated, but we got guns earlier, and so they sort of became less a part of the world curriculum, but the more isolated communities in the east kept The older techniques alive much longer, but anyway, he was in a competition, and one of the things they allowed there, he didn't realize, he's busy, you know, parrying, blocking with rapier and dagger, he parries something, and the guy goes, whoop, and throws the dagger at him, and he said, I was standing there, and I watched this thing through my mask, coming at me in slow motion, going, this can't possibly be, and the guy won the point because they're allowed to throw the weapons.
 
[00:27:16] Matty: Interesting.
 
[00:27:17] Teel: Now, no one in a sane fight would throw away their only weapon, but in this case, he had parried the sword with both of his, so the guy had a free shot, but he wasn't in range to stab him, so he just threw it, and it's an insane move in a real fight, but on the other hand, he hit him. Now, in a real fight, maybe the guy would have dodged his head, but at the same time, that would have thrown his timing off, and you might have been able to kill him with the sword. You know, crazy stuff. It's perfectly justifiable, you know, the best knife fight I ever saw in any movie, the most realistic, was years ago, they used to have little video boxes outside movie theaters, and they would run a clip of a movie, and some Spanish film, I'll never, I don't know what it was, Mexican or Spanish film, because I don't speak Spanish, on 48th Street in Manhattan, and these two guys are in a pool hall, and they both got knives, and they're kind of doing this mirror thing, back and forth, one moves in, the other moves back, the other moves left, that guy moves right, and then, the first time one of them commits, he starts to lunge with it. The other guy reaches back, grabs a pool cue, and breaks it over his head. Most realistic sword-knife fight I've ever seen. Not the fight in Under Siege where they go, and they add in the sound effects of knife blades. You don't really parry with knives. Yeah, they're too small. Even Bowie knives are just too small, and the chances of actually catching it on your blade are minuscule. Again, an insane person or an unskilled person might do it, and that would be the one in a thousand times it worked.
 
[00:29:26] Matty: Well, I think that pool hall scene suggests an interesting scenario, which is the person who is carrying a knife because they intend to get in a fight and win, and the person who's carrying a knife because they're striking a pose, you know that they're threatening, but they're not positioning themselves in a way that they're imminently about to have an attack. Can you talk about that a little bit? Like if someone's using it mainly as a prop to threaten.
 
[00:29:51] Teel: Yes. Well, I mean, it's the whole bully scenario. People who bluster very seldom have the courage to carry through. I always tell actors when I'm working with them, don't play tough. Tough people don't pose. Tough people just are. They don't have to go, "Hey, oh," you know, they just look at you and go, "If you do that again, I'll kill you." It's just there. The mindset, and the samurai will talk about this a lot, is that every fight is won or lost before the first blow is struck. It is the mindset and the commitment, because you can't stop someone who's interested in hurting you and doesn't care about whether they get hurt or not. You cannot stop a determined assassin who does not care about their own safety. Which goes back to the crazy person. If a mother is protecting her child, she will leap onto a sword to throw the guy off a cliff with her. She won't parry it. She will do whatever it takes to make sure the child is safe. And if someone feels that the reason for defeating you is greater than their own personal safety, they will win the fight or have to be hacked down to the point where they can't function.
 
I always say that I fight like Brian Boru until five minutes after I'm dead. He was just that crazy. He would just charge large masses of people. There's actually an incident in Mexico when every year the Foreign Legion salutes a wooden hand. It was because it had been a lieutenant in a detachment when Maximilian was occupying Mexico. The lieutenant had a wooden hand from a previous engagement. There was a bunch of legionnaires that were trapped in a hacienda surrounded by hundreds of juaristas. The lieutenant was killed, but the sergeant made them all swear on his wooden hand they would never surrender. And it got to the point where there were like five of them left. Two of them were wounded. They had no bullets and they fixed bayonets and charged the Mexicans. The Mexicans were like, "You see this?" And they didn't fire because they were like, "These guys are crazy." And they didn't fire and didn't fire. The guys kept getting closer. And finally, somebody went, "Hey, we've got to do something about this." They all got up and surrounded them with bayonets to their throats and said, "Surrender." And the corporal, who was the only leader at that point, said, "The Legion does not surrender, you surrender." They all got bayonets at their throats. The Mexican commander said, "I'll tell you what, let's call it a truce." And he said, "We leave with our colors and our wounded comrades." The Mexicans were like, "You got it." And they saluted them as they marched out. Their determination was like the Alamo, but they won. Their determination. Their spirit was stronger than the people they were fighting because it really wasn't their battle anyway. They were occupying a foreign country, but it was for the honor of the Legion. That's one of the things is we've instilled a lot of artificial values in humans. One of them is the whole honor, flag, country, family. Family is the only one of those that's kind of a natural thing. You would protect your flag, and you would protect your offspring. The others have sort of been manufactured to give a reason for people to do things. Like I said, my reason to become fit, or at least appear to be fit, which is hilarious, people always used to say I was a physical guy, and I'm still not, never was. My reason to be fit was to be able to hold a sword. So that overcame my physical tiredness, my sickness, the exhaustion and stupidity. I mean, sometimes I think back at what I did when I was, you know, a 20, 30-year-old, and I'm like, how come I'm still alive? I mean, I went on to have people set me on fire for money.
 
Achieving a realistic portrayal of bladed weapon wounds
 
[00:34:01] Matty: That could be a whole other podcast episode, but I wanted to use that as a takeoff. I want to stick with the bladed weapons conversation because I think we're delving into a great topic, and that is one of the other things we wanted to talk about was the wounds and the reaction to wounds and realistic portrayal. And we talked a couple of times about what adrenaline does for you, and you were just mentioning people fighting for things like family and honor and so on. So what do you see in movies, if you're the recipient of the bladed weapon attack, what do you see that is good or bad? What should people try for or avoid?
 
[00:34:37] Teel: I do a lecture on guns and violence with weapons that way. And one of the things is, Matt Dillon in 20 years of Gunsmoke was shot 50 times and knocked unconscious 20 times, and in 8 years on air, Mannix was shot 20 times and knocked unconscious 37 times. Now, if you're knocked unconscious, that's a concussion. You have enough concussions. You don't talk right. You don't walk right. You're neurologically dumb. If you're shot, there's trauma shock. If you're stabbed, one of the things in duels, realistically, most duels post-1600 in Europe, personally, if it was a duel of honor, you fought stripped to the waist, male or female. And the reason for that was they figured out that if you drive fabric into the wound, which you would if you're stabbing somebody wearing a cotton shirt, there's always going to be some cotton fibers in there. They will fester, and you will die of the infection. More people died of infections after sword fights than the actual cuts or thrusts. Now I've been stabbed. I was stabbed in the stomach when I was doing a movie, and one of the guys I was working with, we're doing a sequence, and he missed the mark and he just stabbed me in the stomach, and I looked down and said, "Damn it, Scott, you frickin stabbed me." And he looked at me and went, "Yeah, sorry about that."
 
[00:36:03] Matty: So, fortunately or unfortunately, I had enough blub, and he stopped it as soon as he made contact with my body. But I still have a stab mark. He went in maybe about an inch, and any penetration anywhere on the torso and in most of the limbs even, any penetration more than two inches, you will hit a vital organ. Which is why there used to be a rule in New York that you couldn't have a knife first. You can't have a knife that's two-edged, ever, because the only purpose for a two-edged knife is to kill. That's a weapon, and you couldn't have it longer than two fingers' width when you hold two fingers up and you're measuring from one side to the other, because that's a little bit less than two inches. It's supposedly to reduce the chance of fatal injuries if someone has a knife and uses it in a fight.
 
So, swords, you can survive an 8-inch, 10-inch, 12-inch slash with a much greater chance of recovering almost completely than you could a 3-inch stab. Anywhere on your torso, because that three-inch stab will go into the liver, kidney, heart, lungs, and at a point in history, there was no way to stop sucking chest wounds. There was no way to stop a punctured lung. You either recovered or you didn't. Jim Bowie was stabbed and shot and clubbed and spent, I think it was seven months recovering because he had a thrust through the lung, and after that, everybody considered him a superman, that he was unkillable in the famous sandbar fight.
 
So, infection was a very big risk. One of the things that's odd about history is the Mongols wore very light armor. They wore silk shirts. And one of the reasons they wore silk shirts is because when they were hit with an arrow, it would not penetrate the silk; it would push the silk into the wound, and you could literally grab the edges of the shirt and work it to pop the arrow back out. It reduced the chances of infection since silk didn't promote infection, and it also reduced the chances of penetration because silk was a stronger fabric. It's funny that now we have spiders weaving spider silk Kevlar fibers to be used in bulletproof or bullet-resistant vests. So, we've taken modern technology and gone backward. If you look at modern riot armor, it looks like 15th-century fighting armor because what worked then still works now. If someone's going to hit you with something, you're protected in those areas.
 
However, there were some wounds they could not heal. There was something called the Coupé de Jeannac, a very famous duel between the Comte de Jeannac and a favorite of one of the Louis. Dueling was forbidden except this was affair of honor. They got all dressed up in their armor, and the Comte de Jeannac asked his sword master, "Look, we're in armor. I'm not that good with a sword. Can you teach me something? Something that I might be able to use, you know, a secret move." His secret move was to parry, slide in on the blade, and then cut the back of the knee—the tendons in the back of the knee—because in armor, you have to leave that area open. Even if you're wearing chainmail, it's much less armored or protected. In this case, most of the time they were not wearing chainmail pants, or they were fighting on foot. It was just too heavy.
 
They fought for a while. He sliced the back of the guy's leg, and he went down. They moved into the pavilion to try and stitch it up, but they didn't have the capability to really fix it, and he would have been crippled for life. He was so upset he ripped off the bandages and bled to death. The other side of that was that he was the favorite of the king, and the king was so sure that his guy was going to win that he had a big pavilion full of food for the big party afterward. But when the guy died, the king was so disgusted he left, and the populace went in, looted the pavilion, and had a great feast. The Comte de Jeannac had to flee to another country. But it's called the Coupé de Jeannac, the Cut of Jeannac. There are a lot of wounds like that, unhealable. If you were a swordfighter who'd been in any kind of battles for any length of time, you limped, or you were missing a finger, or you had scars on you. You woke up in the morning and you ached like crazy. There was a reason Athos drank a lot of wine. He ached a lot from a lot of fights. The other thing people don't realize is Athos was probably in the ancient age of about 30. He was the old guy. You know, D'Artagnan was 16, and Aramis and Athos and Porthos were probably around 20 because you just didn't live that long then, certainly not in a profession where you were either under fire or being stabbed on a regular basis.
 
Guidelines for realistic portrayals of recovery time
 
[00:41:29] Matty: If someone's writing a current-day story and they have someone who's stabbed or otherwise injured with a bladed weapon, can you give some guidelines about what would be an actual realistic recovery time? And maybe you can assume one scenario where the person actually has access to medical care and one where they don't. Can you give some guidelines about that?
 
[00:41:49] Teel: Yeah, if you're stabbed, it depends on where you're stabbed. They're really big on getting shot in the arm or shot in the leg in Mannix and in a lot of Westerns, and they usually just put a handkerchief on it and wander off. By the end of the hour, they're wandering around. If you're shot in the leg, you're done. It's the largest artery in the body, the largest muscle group. You're going to walk like Chester if you recover. If you're stabbed, it depends on if it's in a muscle group, how much tissue damage is to it. So realistically, let's say it's a four-inch knife. You get cut badly on the forearm and then stabbed in the leg before you break a bottle over the guy's head, and he's out. The forearm, if it's a cut, chances are it'll be stitched up. Unless he cut tendons, you know, a couple of weeks from then, it'll be sore for quite a while, and you may always feel the weather, but you'll be fine.
 
If he stabs you in the thigh, that could be months of recovery time because it went deeper, and they would actually have to do surgery internally to sew up the layers. We are basically onions, and that's why we cry so much. If your hero has a deep cut like that on the leg, it could be months before they can walk normally, if ever, really. And I said if you're cut on the back, that's what I say if you're in a knife fight, you want to control where you're cut. If you're cut here, there's less damage than if you're cut here. If you're cut here, it's all the tendons that work your hand.
 
On the outside of the arm, if you're going to get cut or slashed, even in the bicep or tricep area, is the least of two evils. If you're cut on the inside, you have all of the tendons that operate your fingers, and you have a major vein that runs on the inside. The brachial vein runs on the inside of the bicep, so you want to protect that. There's a reason we were built like a cage. We are basically a layer of suet on top to help protect the bones so they're not brittle. That's fine for slashes or contact wounds. A stab can go through and between those bones. So that's why it's always more dangerous.
 
There's a very famous moment in the historical battle of Agincourt where the French were so jammed together because the English stopped the front line with their longbows. The French were so anxious to get going, they kept moving. So the back lines kept piling up on top of the front lines. They had their distance, so the English just kept shooting bows at them. They got to the point where they couldn't swing their swords. The big cry was, "Estoc! Estoc! Stab! Stab!" Because it was the only way they could fight. Also, when you're wearing armor, stabbing is actually more effective if you can get to the joints. Most knights, when we think of knightly combat, their main weapon was a hammer because you were wearing a tin can, you can't cut that, so they would basically use blunt force weapons, or they would have a pick. One side would be a flat hammer, and the other side would be like what we think of as a railroad pick. You would try to use the pick to get through the armor and pry the guy out. So, you know, it's, and while knights could move very fluidly, you know, up until recently, maybe 30 or 40 years ago, the myth persists because historians never put on armor. Historians sit in places and read books.
 
You have got guys who actually put the armor on when it's fitted for them. It actually is lighter than modern combat gear and is suspended from more points. A full suit of armor might have 80 points of suspension. You wore an arming coat underneath it. Each section was connected, and it might weigh 60 to 80 pounds. Modern combat gear that a Marine might wear, like going into Afghanistan, weighs 120 pounds. It's basically just over the shoulders and the waist. So it's only got three points of suspension. I liken it to modern-day firefighters with all of their gear. Knights could move faster and more nimbly. They could swim. They could climb. They could swing on ropes. Otherwise, no castle would have ever been invaded. You know, so the illusion that knights were big and clumsy and could move very well was not true. They also were the best-fed of the people. They had the most meat, and that's why the Royal Guards are called the Beefeaters. They got the highest percentage of actual meat and vegetables. They didn't have to live off millet and leeks. They also had a more nutritious diet, which gave them more energy and a higher calorie count.
 
A well-done current-day knife fight movie scene
 
[00:46:58] Matty: Well, I wanted to wrap up with one more question. This is to bring it back to writers who are writing more current-day knife fights or bladed weapons fights. Is there a movie scene that you think does an especially good job?
 
[00:47:14] Teel: The best knife fight I can think of is in a William Friedkin movie, "The Hunted." It stars Benicio Del Toro and Tommy Lee Jones, and they have a brilliant knife fight in it. They have a little bit of a Wolverine thing going on. They play the wounds, but not as seriously as it would really be. They wouldn't have had that much adrenaline to keep going after being stabbed a couple of times. But, yeah, it's very realistic in the sense that they are two experts who know each other, so they can really engage in a fight, checkmate, fight, checkmate kind of thing realistically. It's not terribly drawn out, but it gives you a real sense of a visceral sword fight or knife fight.
 
The other one, believe it or not, is a Japanese film with Christopher Lambert called "The Hunted." The premise of it is that Christopher Lambert's a murder happens and he sees the face of one of the ninjas. They think they killed him, but he's not dead. This martial arts sect, though contemporary, has been fighting this ninja sect forever. They find out he's alive and they have to protect him.
 
It has some of the most realistic sword fights, and it's contemporary, from around 1990. There's a fight on a train that's phenomenal, where they're literally fighting guys in the middle of the smoking car, basically on a train. It very much kind of has Highlander vibes in that sense. Brilliantly shot, but both movies are called "The Hunted," so you have a nice, realistic and well-done knife fight, and another slightly less realistic but really well-done sword fights in the Lambert movie.
 
Matty: Well, DJ, thank you so much. This has been so interesting. I appreciate you sharing your insights and expertise with us. And please let the listeners and viewers know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you do online.
 
Teel: I have a website called theurbanswashbuckler.com. My books are on Amazon. I have "Dragon Throat," which is a novel of Alteva, a sword and fantasy, and "Journey to Stormrest," from the same series. I also have a book about a modern-day ninja, which I call "Martial Arts Noir." It's a murder mystery story, but his mother was an assassin for the Japanese during World War II, and he was raised by her. She taught him how to kill people. It's called "Killing Shadows," and they're both out from Airship 27. I'm around, I'm on Facebook with Teel James Glenn, T E E L, James Glenn. It's very hard for me to hide. I'm too big.
 
[00:49:55] Matty: Perfect. Thank you so much.
 
[00:49:57] Teel: Thank you.

Episode 202 - Acting on Inspiration Anywhere with Kevin Tumlinson

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Kevin Tumlinson talks about ACTING ON INSPIRATION ANYWHERE, including how he wrote a short story, designed its cover, and published it while waiting in line at Disney World; the benefits of the small screen; how the option to write on your phone should be considered an opportunity but not a requirement to produce; the vital consideration of what fills you back up creatively; the madness of rapid release (exacerbated by AI); the question of whether an author can maintain a career by slowing down; and the possibilities of multi-media (but don't forget the words).

Kevin Tumlinson is a bestselling and award-winning novelist, a prolific podcaster, and a popular public speaker. He's known as "The Voice of Indie Publishing" for his work helping thousands of authors to start, build, and grow their writing careers.

Episode Links

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Episode 201 - Crafting Great Scene Descriptions with Alessandra Torre

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Alessandra Torre talks about CRAFTING GREAT SCENE DESCRIPTIONS, including if and how scene descriptions vary by genre, the challenge of repeating descriptions across a series, the importance of engaging all the senses, tapping into the familiar and the unfamiliar, and the value of both potato chip scenes and casserole scenes.

And if you want to dive deeper into this topic, some of Alessandra’s recommendations, especially related to the power of assessing well-reviewed and successful books in your genre, are a great companion piece to Episode 195 - The Anatomy of a Bestseller with Sacha Black.
 
If one of those topics piques your interest, you can easily jump to that section on YouTube by clicking on the flagged timestamps in the description.
 
Alessandra / AR Torre is an award-winning New York Times bestselling author of thirty novels. She is self-published, as well as traditionally published by Hachett, Harlequin, and Thomas & Mercer. In addition to writing, Alessandra is the CEO of Authors AI and the cofounder of Inkers Con.

Episode Links

https://www.inkerscon.com/inkers-con-articles/2023/3/8/heres-a-fun-exercise-to-make-your-scene-descriptions-better
www.alessandratorre.com
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