Mastering the Craft: Advice for the Aspiring Crime Fiction Novelist
My advice for the aspiring novelist can be boiled down to three words: read, write, persist. Let’s take them one at a time.
Read. Stephen King, in his excellent book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, states “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.” Those parenthetical words—or the tools—are critical. Reading good (and bad) books is where you will learn most of what you need to know as a writer. That’s not to say that formal education isn’t valuable—of course it is—but nothing will teach you more than reading. Reading is also the primary tool of research.
While writing and editing The Language of the Birds, I probably read close to two dozen non-fiction books on a wide variety of topics. Your time spent reading should be measured in hours per day. Every day.
Write. Practice makes perfect, right? And it is oft said that you have to spend 10,000 hours doing something before you master it. That’s five years at forty hours per week, or ten years half-time. So, you better get writing! In all seriousness, if you chase your stars wisely and maintain any semblance of humility, you will probably never think you’ve achieved perfection or mastered writing at all. But you will need to spend a lot of time writing. However, you don’t have to write in any particular order. Write whatever scene most intrigues you on a given day.
For The Language of the Birds, the ending (or the resolution/denouement, to be more precise) came to me when I’d written less than half of the first draft. Ideally, you should write every day. Stephen King writes 2,000 words per day. Personally, I can do that on the best of days but I can’t maintain that pace.
Persist. Read, write, repeat might be a slightly catchier phrase than read, write, persist, but I think it’s important to emphasize the need for persistence. First, you’ve got all that time reading and writing. That’s going to require some persistence right off the bat. As mentioned above, research reading alone can be daunting. I often read an entire non-fiction book and came away with only a single quote or even just the seed of an idea that would lead down a different path. Second, if you’re writing long-form fiction (i.e., a novel), you’re taking on a project that is a marathon rather than a sprint. And if you’re trying to get traditionally published, make than an ultramarathon. There will be times when you are very discouraged—because the words won’t come at all, or because the words that do come feel like crap, or because agents keep sending you form rejection letters without providing any feedback, or … or … or. You get the idea. Listing all the things that will frustrate you would exceed my word limit for this brief article.
For The Language of the Birds, one of the biggest challenges was creating the puzzles and ciphers. It was fun, but very time-consuming and really slowed down the process of writing the first draft (almost a year and half for the first draft and over eight years between first words and publication). In the case of the puzzles, I generally did work backwards, first figuring out where I needed to end up and then figuring out how to get there in an obtuse but believable manner.
Last, you won’t just need persistence. You’ll also need support. Supportive family and friends are vital, but if they’re not writers then there’s only so much they can do (both because they won’t understand what you’re going through and because they haven’t studied the tools or the language of the craft). So, you should find (or create) a community of writers. These are the people (along with a patient spouse or best friend) that will see you through your darkest days as a writer. They can relate. They will understand. And, just as important, they can provide meaningful feedback that you can’t expect to get from family and friends who don’t write. If you’re in a metropolitan area, you can probably find a writing group to join in person. I live in the sticks, so I met my writing friends in online courses and have never had the pleasure of seeing most of them in person. But I honestly can’t imagine navigating this journey without them. This is a massive undertaking. You can do it, but you don’t have to—and shouldn’t—do it alone.
Good luck! I look forward to reading your work.
About the Author
K. A. Merson is a vaguely reclusive writer who lives in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, along with a patient spouse, a malevolent boxer dog, and an Airstream trailer.
She’s not, in other words, your average teenager.
So when she learns her mother’s been kidnapped and finds a cryptic test accompanying the ransom note, she’s not just horrified-but electrified. Solving puzzles and cracking codes are what she does best, and she knows exactly how to tackle the challenge the kidnappers are dangling in front of her.
What she doesn’t yet realize is that she’s been enlisted in a treasure hunt, on the trail of an occult, centuries-old secret her father supposedly took to his grave. And if the prize at the end is real, it could shake the world.
As Arizona chases the truth through fiendish puzzles and ancient texts, unearthing clues both buried underground and hiding in plain sight in the Western landscape, she’s forced to navigate the outside world in ways she never has before―and begins to forge connections she never dreamed she could.
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