, Author at Ann Henry Editor and Author

Enhance Your Story with Setting

When composing your story, don’t neglect the setting. Is it warm or cold? Spring or fall? Dawn or midnight? Does your story take place in an urban setting or on a rural farm? Are desert sands blowing or are ocean waves crashing? Or is the morning air at the beach warm and humid on a gentle breeze as it wafts in off a summer sea, bringing with it the smell of seaweed and the raucous caws of gulls?

When we speak of setting in the literary world, we mean time and place.

The time may be very general as in “prehistoric times” or “future times,” or it may be extremely specific as in “exactly three seconds before midnight on April 15, 2017.” The time of most stories falls somewhere between these two extremes—a twelfth-century winter afternoon; a morning in 1863; nine o’clock on a contemporary winter’s night; an eighteenth-century March day; a fourth watch in the 23^rd Century.

As you can see, these temporal descriptions give us some idea about the story’s context but not nearly enough for us to feel at home there. For that, we need the second element of setting: place.

Again, place may be simply generic—a pine forest; a tropical isle; an Italian restaurant—or quite specific: the Oval Office of the White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C.

These examples of place may ground us a bit better than the time examples did, but still we are not confident of our surroundings until we put the two together.

See how much more you feel immersed in the description when you have both time and place: a twelfth-century Danish castle; the porch of a Vicksburg, Mississippi, antebellum home on a summer morning in 1863; nine o’clock at night on a current-day street corner in wintertime Chicago; an eighteenth-century March day in Dublin, Ireland; or the fourth watch on the bridge of a starship in the 23^rd Century.

Once you have the basic time and place needed to convincingly convey your tale, fill in with details as needed to further support and enhance your story. If your voyaging yacht is caught in a gale, describe the time—midnight watch in mid-November, current year; the location—Atlantic Ocean, 200 miles northwest of Bermuda; the weather—northeasterly winds at 40 knots with lashing rain; lunar condition—moonless; sea conditions—22-foot seas with every fourth wave breaking over the stern; what sails, if any, are up; course direction, and so on.

If your story is a short story, it may well take place in a single room. If, on the other hand, it is a novella or novel, it may include many different times and locations. Give each the attention it deserves in relation to its importance in the tale so as to pull the reader more firmly into the story as the setting influences the plot and characters and, if appropriate, reflects the theme.

Creative Writing

Fear Not Your Shadow

I have a new motto:

Read endlessly… Write fearlessly… Edit ferociously.

But don’t let that word ferociously scare you. Instead, charge fearlessly ahead as you write your first draft and ignore that tiger of an editor chasing your script. Put him in a cage and don’t let him out until you’ve finished writing whatever part of the story you’re working on.

Many well-proven writers recommend that you don’t do any editing at all until you have written the entire work at least one time through. Others -- well, at least a few anyway -- do edit what they’ve written during their previous session prior to continuing the first draft. I happen to fall into the second group.

But here is the point, and I know because I’ve done this: If you keep fretting over language details, such as whether to use a questionable comma or to say “grinned” as opposed to “smiled,” you will take f-o-r-e-v-e-r to finish writing out your story, and the passion and the freshness and the drive will be lost. And those are story attributes that are not easily resurrected in revision.

So turn off your spell- and grammar-checkers while you’re writing. Leave the dictionary in the other room or at least not by your side. Forget that Grammar Girl and a thesaurus are waiting for you online. And if you are writing fiction, then forget everything in the real world that you don’t need for your story and immerse yourself in your fictional world.

You may sense that there is a tiger at your back, but it is nothing more than a shadow. It’s just your left brain, a mere shadow of your hard-working and creative right brain, vying for your attention. Don’t listen to left-brain’s chatter. Just keep writing. You can revise your manuscript later, and you or someone else can do final copy editing when the revising stage is finished.

Don’t be afraid of your shadow. It can’t hurt your story unless you let it.

Creative Writing

Who’s There?

A year or two ago, a novel by Paula Hawkins, The Girl on the Train, was all the rage. It seemed to me that it was mentioned every time I turned on the radio, and people, including some of my friends, were reading it. It was touted as providing an exceptionally good example of the “unreliable narrator” in fiction.

Being a novelist, this, of course, interested me. But I didn’t rush out to buy it because, like so many fiction writers, I needed to wait till the price came down.

And then I heard the book was being made into a movie, so sometime later when my husband and I were perusing free movies we could download on the computer, I leapt with excitement when I saw The Girl on the Train on the list. I insisted we watch it.

“It’s a mystery,” I told him. “It’s based on a highly acclaimed novel. You’ll like it.”

Well, we watched that movie. And I think maybe it did involve an unreliable narrator – or at least an unreliable character—but it didn’t seem to be the story I’d heard about. It was a very strange movie, so it was hard to tell since I hadn’t read the book, but now I was more interested than ever as to whether this was the same story (it wasn’t) and, if not, what the other Girl on the Train was actually about.

And so, you guessed it, I broke down and paid full price for the book.

Was it intriguing? Yes. Was it well written? Basically, yes. Was it a good mystery? Yes. Was it creative? Definitely. Kudos to author Paula Hawkins.

But, in my opinion, it had a problem:

During longer dialogue passages, I often mistook who was speaking because both of the speakers sounded the same.

Granted, these were English women of the same general age who lived in the same area, so it makes sense that their choice of words and syntax would be quite similar, but in a work of fiction, the writer needs to make each character’s speech distinctive enough that readers can easily know who is speaking in a lengthy dialogue passage without needing continual dialogue tags to remind them.

Is one character vivacious and the other quite reticent? This should be evident in their conversation. Does one character have a favorite expression that frequently peppers zir speech? If so, use it. Does one character tend to be direct when asking or answering questions while the other hems and haws around, asking only hesitantly and giving only reluctant, evasive answers? This, too, should be evident in the dialogue.

These are devices you can use to help guide the reader through lengthy dialogue without constantly interrupting it to tell the reader who is speaking.

But what if the dialogue is short and clipped, consisting mainly of one- or two-word questions, answers, and comments? That, I admit, presents a challenge. Unless, of course, you’re novelist John Sandford, who can easily peg police investigator Virgil Flowers with the single expression, “Huh.”

Isn’t it amazing how often the best answer to a problem is a simple one?

Huh.

Creative Writing

Know Where You’re Headed

London, Sydney, or Tokyo? As we stood by this directional sign on a small island in the middle of the South Pacific, my husband and I chose Sydney, by way of Noumea, as we were sailing. But we did not wait until we were in Apia, the capital of Samoa (formerly known as Western Samoa), to decide on our final destination. We had spent months planning this voyage across the South Pacific before we ever left Mexico, and so, even though our plans were of the type that welcomes deviation, we knew that we would generally head in a southwesterly direction and that we expected to wind up in Australia.

This is how I like to write fiction. No matter what sparks my interest in writing the story or where, if anywhere, on the plotline that spark might land, I find a beginning point from which to spin the tale and know, usually before I begin writing it, just how it will end. In fact, I find that knowing the ending before writing the story is even more important than knowing the beginning. You can always go back and find, or add, the beginning, but it is difficult to write a story if you don’t know where it is going.

When my husband, Jim, and I decided to buy a boat and sail across the Pacific, we did not know whether we would be starting out on the voyage from California, Mexico, or perhaps Panama, but we knew what ocean (Pacific) and what main part of that ocean (South Pacific) we wanted to cross and where (Australia) we wanted to end the journey. This meant that we would want to begin the voyage from the west coast of Southern California, Mexico, or Central America and that we could plan what islands we might want to visit, beginning with those in French Polynesia, no matter the specific location of our jumping off point.

The middle of the journey would work itself out, with many variations possible within the general geographic area through which we would be traveling, because all those possible way points lay between our starting point and our final destination. Our plans for the middle of the trip could be determined or revised at will as long as we did not veer too far off the route to Australia. In other words, we would probably need to stop in Fiji, but whether to sail into Vanuatu was entirely up to us, the wind, and the weather. Vanuatu could be considered a minor plot point, one we could easily do without, whereas Fiji was an important one for the story and Sydney, of course, the climax.

Think of it this way: You can fiddle with the middle, but it’s hard to bend the end.

Oahu is a beautiful island, but one would hardly consider it en route from San Diego to Sydney. If your final destination for this journey is Australia, then save Hawaii for another voyage. You can always write another book.

Book

Once Upon a Time…

Remember what it was like when you were a child and heard those magic words, Once upon a time…? It was like a switch was flipped in your brain, and suddenly every cell in your body was straining toward the storyteller, waiting for what would come next. In fact, if you were seated, your body most likely did indeed strain forward while your mind churned with anticipation.

Why? Would you have had the same reaction if someone had begun with Yesterday… or Last year… or even Centuries ago…? Probably not. And again we must ask, “Why?” After all, what does once upon a time mean except sometime in the past? Are those four words, once upon a time, strung together in exactly that order, truly magical?

In a way, yes. The phrase once upon a time is, in a sense, a magic carpet that transports us out of ourselves into a world of fiction where we may kill a fire-breathing dragon, save a beautiful princess, defeat human-eating alien invaders, save a younger sibling from drowning, win the annual spelling bee, make friends with a mermaid, or successfully stand up to the school bully. And that’s just for kids.

Stories for adults seldom begin with those golden words, once upon a time, but that doesn’t mean we grown-ups don’t become just as enthralled as children with the announcement of an impending story. My all-time favorite opening line for a work of fiction is the following:

Born at sea in the teeth of a gale, the sailor was a dog.

Yeah, I know. The Sailor Dog, by Margaret Wise Brown, is a children’s book, but whenever I read that opening, I know I’m in for a good ride.

Now consider the following story opening, intended for us “more mature” folks:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times….

Charles Dickens has taken no more than twelve words and three seconds to pull us into A Tale of Two Cities. Already we want more.

Why? Why do we care? Whatever Dickens is talking about here is obviously in the past and has nothing to do with us or our current situation in life. So why do we yearn to hear more?

Because we can’t help it. It’s in our genes.

Our brains are wired for story. We learn from story, and our brains are always seeking new information to help us survive. With story, we can hear about what tragic happenstance befell the man who went hunting in the jungle after dark or tried to cross the railroad tracks in the path of an oncoming train. We can imagine ourselves in this situation and, with our brain’s guidance, decide that we had better not do the same thing ourselves, thereby living to hear another story another day.

But if the storyteller is masterful enough to transport us with zir story, then by the end we will have experienced adrenaline flow, sweaty palms, and increased heart rate, all without having to put forth the physical exertion of actually trying to outrun the tiger or the train.

And why is “transportation,” that act of “losing” oneself in a story, so pleasing to us? Because, according to a study conducted by Dr. Paul J. Zak, founding director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies and Professor of Economics, Psychology and Management at Claremont Graduate University and Professor of Neurology at Loma Linda University Medical Center, when we are “transported” by story, our brains release oxytocin, a chemical that makes us feel empathy.

Humans are social animals, and empathy helps us to connect with others. Stories encourage us to do this – but only if we are transported by the story. We must be emotionally invested in the story in order for it to have this effect on us. We must suspend our disbelief and go along with the knight in shining armor as he rides off to fight the dragon. Or, to be even more specific, we must not just go along beside the knight, we must become the knight in our minds, and then our brain will take care of the rest.

In his 2015 book, The Irresistible Novel, Jeff Gerke tells us, “The secret to irresistible fiction is to do whatever it takes to gain the reader’s interest and hold it to the end of the book.” In other words, he adds, “You must engage your reader from beginning to end.”

And so when you begin your next story, think about how you will entice the reader to merge with your main character and thus jump gleefully (or slide gracefully) into your own magical realm of fiction. Keep that oxytocin flowing, and you’ll keep your reader happy.

And now come sit with me and let me tell you a story:

Once upon a time….

Creative Writing

A Rose by Any Other Name

According to Shakespeare’s heroine in Romeo and Juliet, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” And I think most of us would agree, especially in reference to an actual rose. However, would you be as tempted to lean down and smell such a flower if you encountered it for the first time after being informed that its common name was nasty, short for its (obviously fictitious) Latin name, nastismellicus? Maybe not.

The same holds true for fiction titles. Of Mice and Men is a far more intriguing and alluring title for adults than, say, Lennie and His Mouse, which sounds like a children’s story. In my opinion, John Steinbeck’s title Of Mice and Men is exemplary in that it fulfills all of my criteria for a good title:

1 – It is significant in relation to the story

2 – It reflects the mood of the story

3 – It is not overly long

4 – It is intriguing in itself

Other excellent titles include Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe; Islands in the Stream, by Ernest Hemingway; Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell; and The Perfect Spy, by John LeCarré. On a slightly different note, I would also include Bad Monkey, by Carl Hiaasen; Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett; Extreme Measures, by Michael Palmer; and Killing Floor, by Lee Child.

The title of Anne Tyler’s novel Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is a bit long but otherwise fits the criteria beautifully. I think it’s a great title and would not advise changing it. But even if you love a good adventure story, how likely would you be to peruse a novel entitled The Long and Arduous Journey of Aloysius Herschfelt Katzenbach? Henry Fielding may have gotten away with it in his most famous novel, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (no wonder we just call it Tom Jones!), but we’re not in the 18th Century anymore, gentle writer. Time has moved on, and the taste, not to mention patience, of our readers along with it.

Although I consider title length to be the least important of my criteria, I nonetheless think it deserves our attention. Even a simple edit, such as changing The Tail of the Dragon to A Dragon’s Tail, can be an improvement.

I recently read an interview with a noted author who, when asked what she found most difficult in the writing process, said it was coming up with a good title. I know how she feels. As I was writing my first novel, A Bit of Sun, I was clueless as to what I should name it until one of my character’s gave me the answer in a bit of dialogue. With my second novel, Sailing Away from the Moon, I had the title (thanks to my husband’s sailing experience) first, then built the story around it.

It wasn’t until I was writing the The Novel Pitch that I came up with the above criteria for fiction titles. Since I was discussing the elements that should be included in a fiction pitch, obviously I needed to address titles. So years after I had named my own novels, I finally gave it serious thought and came up with the aforementioned requirements.

Now I find writing titles to be much easier. I hope you will, too.

Creative Writing

Art or Elephant Ears?

Have you ever written a chapter, scene, or page of dialogue or description that you thought was truly excellent, then reviewed it the next day and thought it positively awful? I have, any number of times. And I gather from what other writers report that many of them have had the same experience.

If you yourself can’t judge your own writing without swinging from extreme negative criticism to high praise, then how can you know whether your writing is truly good? Is it painting the picture you want to paint? Is it drawing the reader into the story? Is it building suspense, gaining empathy for your protagonist, causing the reader to reflect on the great mysteries of life?

Your right brain wants to believe, but your left brain wants to criticize. After all, it’s the supreme editor, and if it can’t find anything wrong with the right brain’s work, then the left brain is out of a job. Therefore, it would seem that the only thing to do is to let someone else decide the merit of your work.

Now, that is not always the best idea. Ultimately, it is up to you, the author, to determine what you want to say with your writing and how best to communicate it. Many long-time writers have come to terms with this conundrum and learned to trust their own instincts. They have no need for or interest in anyone else’s input while working on a manuscript. That can be a good thing. But what about the novice who hasn’t fully developed zir author voice and needs some help?

With the aid of a friend who literally walked around London with my manuscript in her arms, going from one literary agency to another, I was able to obtain a top London agent, Tessa Sayle, to represent A Bit of Sun, my first novel. Before she flew to the West Indies to meet me, Tess sent me a letter noting a dozen or so places in the manuscript that she found confusing or thought should be revised for one reason or another. I made those changes quite easily and without complaint. No problem, no argument. If those few details were my agent’s only criticisms, I was sailing before the wind.

However, by the time we actually met in person, Tess had received half a dozen rejection letters from editors in the UK and so recommended I just “chalk this one up to experience” and start working on my next novel.

As you can well imagine, I resisted this advice and pressed her to come up with a way to “save” my book, a way to make it more appealing to current editors and publishers. Tess gave it a bit of thought and then suggested that I might cut a major portion of the odyssey section of the novel, which admittedly includes some highly unlikely events, and spend more time on the antagonist, which might appeal to the publishing world’s desire to see more fiction pertaining to power and greed.

I nodded as I sat before her, thinking that this could be done, and perhaps it was worth a try. But when I returned to the manuscript with the intention of actually committing such a gutting, I realized that it was quite impossible. Not literally impossible, of course, but thematically impossible. It would yank the heart right out of my story. How then would my protagonist ever know the strength of his own character? How would he learn to question tradition or come to understand the emotions buried deep in his heart?

As for power and greed, I have never had much interest in either. Some may want to read about characters whose main goals in life are financial gain and dominance over others, but I am not among them. And if I don’t care to read such a book, why on earth would I want to write one?

So I told Tess no, I couldn’t (wouldn’t) do it, and years later simply published the book myself because I know it’s a good story well told regardless of whether anyone else wants to publish it. In other words, it’s art to me, and I refuse to let the dictates of commercialism turn it into elephant ears. (And by elephant ears I mean that “treat” made of fried flour with a bit of sugar thrown in that even stray dogs in the Dominican Republic won’t eat.)

On the flip side, I am most grateful to my agent and other friends who read my manuscript and told me that this or that passage bothered them or did not seem true to character. I gave their comments serious consideration and, often times, decided to revise or delete those passages, much to my later relief. In those cases, I’m sure they were right. Other times, after due consideration, I kept the passages questioned and have no regrets.

Bottom line? If you do have others read your manuscript prior to publication, listen to what they have to say, try to find out why they disapprove of any passages they don’t like, and then decide whether those passages should be kept, revised, or tossed. When it comes to your own work, only you can decide what is art and what is elephant ears.

Creative Writing

A Little Goes a Long Way

Fiction writers pay great attention to making their characters seem like real people, and that includes the way they speak. It makes sense that a seasoned homicide detective with three well-armed, menacing criminals advancing upon him would exclaim something other than “puddly jump!” upon discovering that he is backed into a corner in an alley and has just run out of bullets.

I have nothing against the use of four-letter words where appropriate in fiction, and this would certainly seem to be one of those cases. So, yes, if I were writing this story, I would certainly use a realistic expletive here befitting both the character and the situation. The problem arises when such words are overused in fiction—in other words, when you have your f-word-flinging character use that word as often as such a person might do in real life.

“But isn’t that being realistic?” you ask. “And isn’t that what we fiction writers are supposed to do?”

Yes, and no. We are supposed to make our characters seem realistic, and that is why our policeman above would use such an expletive (just one would be sufficient; he doesn’t have time for another in this case anyway). The reader expects it and even derives some satisfaction from it in this instance. The problem lies when this character’s speech is peppered with such expletives all the time, even when not in moments of great stress. In other words, the reader will tire quickly of hearing this detective constantly speak in the following manner for no good reason:

“Yesterday, while I was driving down the expletive deleted highway, I ran out of expletive deleted gas and had to coast all the way down the expletive deleted ramp only to discover that the expletive deleted gas station at the expletive deleted exit was expletive deleted out of business!”

Okay, maybe use one of these expletives—the last one, perhaps?—but that will do. I mean, really, six in one sentence? A little over the top, wouldn’t you say? Well, maybe you wouldn’t, but trust me: most of your readers would. They may feel so beaten over the head with these slap-you-in-the-face expletives that they have trouble keeping up with the story.

One such book that still sticks in my mind fifty years after reading it is Love Story, by Erich Segal. I was a freshman in college when I read it and couldn’t help but notice that a college student in the novel talked just like my friends and I, now finally released from the controls of our more civilized parents, did. I realized while reading the novel how true to reality this aspect of Segal’s character was, but I also noticed that seeing that s-word umpteen times per page whenever this character was speaking soon began to irritate me.

Don’t get me wrong, I still liked the novel (I was an 18-year-old female; I had no choice), but the fact that one of the few details I remember about the book is the overuse of such expletives says something important, I think, for us writers to consider when we are tempted to use such words in our fiction.

The same advice applies to dialect: very much is too much. Try using syntax or commonly used colloquial expressions or phrases instead to remind readers that this character is from Jamaica, Pakistan, or the Deep South. Two of my favorite such phrases from the West Indies are “He sent my jumby to the bush!” and “I met it there.” How much more charming than leaving off the final g in an -ing word or misspelling the word there by writing it as they-uh.

Remember: A little goes a long way, so don’t overdo it.

Creative Writing

Leave Classwork in the Classroom

Have you ever begun to read a work of fiction and almost immediately had the thought, Oh! This author has taken a class on creative writing? I find that this usually occurs to me when I’m reading a narrative passage with an unnecessary amount of description that seems to make a point of including all five senses: taste, touch, smell, sight, and sound. Take the following example:

Robert stepped out of the freezing cold of the ice cream parlor into warm sunshine and felt his ears begin to thaw. The springtime fragrance of jasmine pleasantly tickled his nose as he sauntered down the sidewalk, noting the hardness of the concrete beneath his shoes. As he walked on, he took a lick of the pale green ice cream stuffed into the waffled cone clutched tightly in his hand. Already the frozen concoction was beginning to drip down the cone. He felt a sticky, gelatinous stream begin to slide down his wrist and licked it, tasting the salt of his sweat mixed in with the sweetness of sugar and cream. He licked his lips and then took a quick bite of the ice cream, wincing at the cold on his teeth even while enjoying the crunch of a pistachio nut between them.

The sound of a small plane engine droning overhead caught his attention, and he looked up between the sunlit leaves of an overhanging tree to get a glimpse of the plane. It was a Cessna, painted blue, and it was towing a long white sign with large black letters behind it. In an effort to get a better look at the sign, Robert stepped out from under the tree and looked up to read: Tammy, will you marry me?

Filing this away in his head as one more possible approach to making a proposal—if he should ever be so lucky as to get another girlfriend now that Sheila with her pixie blond hair and taunting, painted-on eyebrows had dumped him—Robert turned the corner, still looking up into the shimmering blue sky, and bumped right into a leggy young woman with big brown eyes and long, wavy red hair. Diverting his attention downward, he grimaced upon noticing that his ice cream cone was now crushed into the front of her white, lacy, voluptuously filled-out blouse.

Without knowing more about the story, we assume that the point of this scene is that Robert meets the girl with the long, wavy red hair by accidentally walking into her and crushing his ice cream cone between them, leaving a gooey mess on the front of her blouse. So it’s fine to indicate that he is walking down the sidewalk on a nice, sunny day with an ice cream cone, notices the sign being pulled by a plane overhead, takes note of this marriage proposal method for future reference, has his brief thought about the former girlfriend Sheila (leaving out her hair and eyebrows), and then bumps into the red-haired young woman, spilling ice cream onto her clothes.

But do we really need to know that he notices the hardness of the concrete sidewalk beneath his shoes (unless this is to indicate that his shoe soles have worn thin and that he is too poor to replace them, which would need to be more specifically stated) or that he licks ice cream off his wrist and enjoys the crunch of a nut between his teeth or that the plane pulling the sign is a blue Cessna? I think not.

Including more than sight, or even sight and sound, in your descriptions can be a good thing, but don’t go crazy trying to include all five senses every time you need a bit of description to bring the reader into the scene. When it comes to description, less is often more. Save all that expansive, precise detail for when you really need it—like when your protagonist is fleeing the villain through the woods and every sense of the protagonist is on high alert to help zerm to escape.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be a matter of life and death for you to want to use “real time” in your fiction. If you would like to see how one highly successful author uses description to create a sense of real time in a most dramatic way, I recommend you read Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full, which includes several excellent examples.

In the meantime, keep your creative writing lesson assignments in a notebook to view at your leisure and keep only the overall important idea behind those lessons in your forebrain while doing the serious work of writing for the real world. Your readers will thank you.

Creative Writing

The Research Iceberg

Robert Louis Stevenson's Study — Robert Louis Stevenson’s Study

Despite the literary license we fiction writers supposedly hold, readers expect a certain amount of realism and accuracy in stories that are based on the real world in either current or historical times, and so a bit—or even a lot—of research is often in order. Sometimes we writers spend more time doing necessary or desired research than we do actually writing the story. And when that is the case, we feel compelled to let the reader in on just how much research we have put into our writing project and how knowledgeable we have become as a result.

Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!

Consider the following example derived from a climactic scene:

Juanita stood at his side with her heart pounding and her ankles in chains as she glanced at the gun in his holster. Arnoldo didn’t seem to notice. He was too busy observing the terrain.

“Let’s see what Sir Lancelot is up to now,” he said.

Holding the binoculars in his right hand, he raised them to his eyes and looked out the window. Juanita grabbed the gun from his holster and, gripping the pistol in both hands, stepped back as Arnoldo spun to face her.

“Don’t move, or I’ll shoot!” she warned, still keeping both hands, now dripping with sweat, on the gun.

It was a Glock 17, a 9mm semi-automatic pistol, the result of Gaston Glock’s 17^th patent for the gun—hence the name. Glock started developing the pistol, now a favorite among policemen and civilians alike, in 1980 to compete in the Austrian Armed Forces pistol weapons trials. Made of steel and a high strength, black polymer plastic, this revolutionary new design won the Austrian weapons trials. In 1982 Glock was awarded a contract to supply the Austrian Armed Forces with his Glock 17, which the Austrian military dubbed the P80.

Call it what you will, it felt good and solid in Juanita’s hands, and she could only hope that if it was good enough for the Austrian army it would be good enough for her. Assuming, of course, that it was still loaded.

Does the reader really care about the history of this type of gun at this point in the story? I should certainly hope not. If zee does, then the author hasn’t done a very good job of pulling zerm into the story. If, on the other hand, the reader is emotionally involved in the story, then zee will be frantically trying to find where all this irrelevant background description ends so that zee can get back into the story and find out what happens to Juanita.

Do all the research you need to do to feel comfortable with your subject matter so that you can write with accuracy and confidence, but don’t litter your copy with irrelevant facts or bore your reader with long-winded descriptions that bog down the story. Think of your research as an iceberg, ninety per cent of which remains submerged, unseen and unnoticed, while still carrying on the important work of supporting that ten per cent that can be seen above the water. Keep ninety per cent of your research hidden while using the other ten per cent to dazzle the reader with your story’s accuracy and authenticity.

Remember: Like a sports fan who wants to enjoy the game without thinking about all the practice that went into making it seem so effortless, your reader wants to be entertained, not burdened with the obligation to take note of all the research you had to do to make your story seem real.