Lawrence
Peter Berra, known to most of the world as “Yogi,” died last month at the age
of 90. A Hall of Fame catcher for the great Yankee teams of the late 1940s to
early 1960s, he might almost be better known these days for the quotes
attributed to him. (By the way, he claims he didn’t say some of them.)
Reading his
obituary in the Times, which, of
course, was chock-full of said quotes, it struck me that a number of his
observations (with a bit of interpretation, of course) are relevant to the
craft of crime and mystery fiction writing.
Figuring
that someone else must have had the same idea, I Googled it and came up empty.
So I decided to run with that idea for this week’s post because, as Yogi
himself once said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
Wisdom for Writers of All Stripes
That quote,
actually, is a decent one to start with because one of the problems writers of
all stripes have is reaching a point in the manuscript and not knowing which
way to go from there. I suspect that over the course of human history, the
amount of wasted time owing to writers hitting such an impasse rivals the
accumulated waste of all governments since the beginning of time.
Yogi’s
advice — essentially, make a decision and go with it — is well worth taking.
Most of the time, either direction will work if the writer applies him or her
self, and if there is a wrong choice, trying to make it work will render it
more quickly apparent than intellectualizing about it and doing nothing. Action
trumps uncertain hesitation.
“If you
can’t imitate him, don’t copy him,” is another Yogi-ism. Applied to the
business of crime fiction, I would take it to mean that writers shouldn’t try
to assume the styles of established writers, such as Raymond Chandler, Agatha
Christie, Elmore Leonard. They all found their own style, and while we can
certainly learn from them, the rest of us have to adapt that learning to
something that’s ours.
The Crowded Canon
“Nobody
goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” How many writers, I wonder, waste their
energy trying to come up with totally new ideas, when there really aren’t any?
Many, many, I’m guessing. The world of the mystery/crime novel is rich and
diverse enough to accommodate a fresh work in an area of endeavor that seems
pretty crowded.
Or, in
other words, there’s always room for another drunk and cranky detective if he
or she is rendered with telling detail and a good story told in vivid prose. If
you can do that, why waste time on impossible searches for the ungraspable
“new.”
And finally
there’s my favorite, “You can observe a lot just by watching.” That one should
be pretty self-evident. If you want to get good detail and color for your
books, a great starting point is to shut up, look and listen.
When my
first mystery, The McHenry Inheritance,
came out, a lot of people commented that I must have done a lot of research to
make the small-town setting so authentic. Actually, almost everything was
picked up by virtue of observing, listening, and filing things away. If you
eavesdrop in a small-town café, you can learn more about the town’s economy
there than you could from reading a dozen government reports. And I can just
about guarantee you’ll hear some dialogue you couldn’t possibly make up. I hope
you write it down and put it in your next book. I always do.
