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Paul Whybrow

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Jun 20, 2015
Cornwall, UK
I was just watching an episode of American Pickers in which they sold a vintage cyclecar to an auto museum. This unusual lightweight vehicle was fitted with 1914 Henderson motorcycle engine. The new owner proudly declared that it would be "A great conversation piece, bringing people in."

As writers, we talk about word of mouth promotion of best-selling books. The plot of a successful story has to hook the reader, and it helps if it's well-written—but, as we all know, the most awfully written tosh sells in the millions. Increasingly, as I observe the publishing scene, I think that what sells a book are standout moments, which provoke a reaction; if the shock was totally unpredictable, all the better. Get them gossiping and your books will fly off the shelves.

Most authors are nice people, and we self-censor, afraid of causing offence. Why worry? As Oscar Wilde said: 'There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.'

In my own Cornish Detective novels, I've deliberately salted them with shocking incidents, apart from the crimes themselves, in the hope that the bizarreness will lodge in readers' minds—perhaps giving them something to talk about, in an "Is that the one where?" way.

* Book 1—Who Kills A Nudist?—twin brothers, criminal cohorts of a murderous gang leader, are having an incestuous affair, much as notorious London gangsters, the Kray twins did.

* Book 2—The Perfect Murderer—a key witness, a lorry driver who finds one of the murder victims and who was in proximity to another, admits that the reason he's so often out in the wilds on his own, is that he likes having sex with trees! :eek:

Wood you do it for me: A beginner’s guide to dendrophilia

* Book 3—An Elegant Murder—I featured the legendary Beast of Bodmin Moor in this story, with real-life helping me out, for lynxes escaped from local zoos and pumas were spotted too. Helping the fear factor of my story, there were several attacks by pumas on children in America. There have been a couple of fatal attacks since then. We don't have any dangerous predators to worry about in the UK, so the idea of being prey is alien to us. My protagonist detective has two close encounters with a puma, one in captivity, and is left with a sense of dread as his investigation takes place in the wilds of the moor.

* Book 4—Sin Killers—my married murderers, of the title, were not only killing innocent people whose morals they disapproved of, but also eating them, using their skin to make a bodhrán, with a carved bone forming the beater.

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* Book 5—The Dead Need Nobody—an opium addled art collector kills two innocent people, to protect his paintings. A lonely man, he part-embalms one of his murder victims, to keep her for a while to share his favourite paintings. He later turns her into art, by encasing her corpse in concrete and sinking it at an underwater sculpture park, where it's found by divers. This killing for company has a precedent in real life.

What shock-horror moments have you used in your stories, that readers will talk about?

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I'd be worried about splinters and pine resin in unfortunate places, but I suppose love knows no bounds.

Mine's a memoir, so I'm limited to events that actually happened, but I think some of them were sufficiently lurid and shocking as to serve the purpose as you describe in the OP. The impact depends on getting the reading audience to care about the main character though. There's always more bite when it's happening to a person we care about. I want my audience feeling protective and solicitous.
 
Splinters...ayyyeeeee! And no-one can win em all, no matter what. Same goes for us all, but show them how you care, especially for another; could be human, could be animal, your audience will care for you.
 
Paul Wybrow writes: "As we all know, the most awfully written tosh sells in the millions."Is this really true, or do we simply want to believe that it is true. Reminds me of the time when someone told Abraham Lincoln but Gen. Ulysses S Grant consumed two quarts of whiskey a day. To which Lincoln replied "Find out what kind of whiskey it is and send a case of it to my other generals."
 
In my sole thriller novel, my main character, Jack, is a divorced father. His wife and kids were murdered by a bad cop when they drove past during his execution of a rival drug dealer. The police officer is found innocent in court but Jack learns the jurors were threatened with the murder of their families if he was found guilty. The story follows Jack, a trained military snipper as he exacts justice for his family and continues to identify other police criminals who deserve his form of justice.

The shock factor comes in chapter one, where Jack leaves the soup kitchen after serving meals to go to a local food market where he pays for a single mom's groceries, then he drives to a parking garage where he takes aim and executes the bad cop.

In my PI series of novels, my PI is hired by what he swears is a mermaid and paid with gold coins from a sunken Spanish galleon that has never been found. The simple task of finding her brother and relaying the message that he is needed back home turns out to be much more complex than he imagined.
 
In my sole thriller novel, my main character, Jack, is a divorced father. His wife and kids were murdered by a bad cop when they drove past during his execution of a rival drug dealer. The police officer is found innocent in court but Jack learns the jurors were threatened with the murder of their families if he was found guilty. The story follows Jack, a trained military snipper as he exacts justice for his family and continues to identify other police criminals who deserve his form of justice.

The shock factor comes in chapter one, where Jack leaves the soup kitchen after serving meals to go to a local food market where he pays for a single mom's groceries, then he drives to a parking garage where he takes aim and executes the bad cop.

In my PI series of novels, my PI is hired by what he swears is a mermaid and paid with gold coins from a sunken Spanish galleon that has never been found. The simple task of finding her brother and relaying the message that he is needed back home turns out to be much more complex than he imagined.

The shocking things that evil men and women do is something that I like to explore in my novels, showing their humanity as well as their depravity. One serial killer loved wildlife, as he'd spent a long time hiding in the countryside while stalking his targets in war zones, and later, while playing a bizarre role-play game involving killing innocent civilians. My current baddy is a cultured art dealer and collector, but he's taken his obsession too far, preferring paintings to people, who are entirely disposable to him.

The thing is, you wouldn't know that such an evil way of thinking went on inside their heads, just from looking at them. This was first brought home to me, as a young man, when I read the poetry of Leonard Cohen, and I came across a poem about Adolf Eichmann—one of the organisers of the Holocaust:

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I'd be worried about splinters and pine resin in unfortunate places, but I suppose love knows no bounds.

Mine's a memoir, so I'm limited to events that actually happened, but I think some of them were sufficiently lurid and shocking as to serve the purpose as you describe in the OP. The impact depends on getting the reading audience to care about the main character though. There's always more bite when it's happening to a person we care about. I want my audience feeling protective and solicitous.

The coppers in my story have a fun time cracking jokes about the tree-abusing trucker, with references to splinters, turning over a new leaf, barking up the wrong tree, branching out, feeling my sap rising, being stumped, getting wood, rooting around, and have you twigged it yet thrown into conversations. One detective reflects that as long as the truckers doesn't start fiddling around with underage saplings, there's nothing they can do about him, as having sex with trees is not illegal.

My protagonist Chief Inspector, who's green-thinking, realises that he's going to have to stop proudly referring to himself as a 'tree hugger'!

The really weird thing about using dendrophilia as a conversation piece, was that I didn't just pull it out of the air. Instead, while reading about the life of James Boswell, best-known as the biographer of Doctor Johnson, I saw that as a part of his highly sexed life, he'd masturbated against trees as a pubescent lad—which he called a 'small sin'—preferable to the 'larger sin' of fornicating with prostitutes.

Truth is always stranger than fiction.
 
I might well be wrong in having shocking conversation pieces in my stories, at least if I want to become a multi-million best-selling author. According to John Grisham, the way to success is:

“I decided I did not want to write books that would embarrass my mother, so I wrote The Firm without the gratuitous violence and sex [of the first one].
“Once I finished it I realised I could give it to my 80-year-old mother or a 15-year-old kid and I sold a lot of books.”


I’d never have been a success if Mum wasn’t a prude

In this way, Grisham created a product that, it could be argued, is utilitarian—as his stories are open to being enjoyed by anybody. The people that make the most money, are those that invent something that we all use again and again—a consumable—light bulbs, soap and toilet rolls! :rolleyes:
 
I'm about to write a mutual seduction scene in my fifth Cornish Detective novel, which will be the penultimate chapter. With my long-suffering copper seemingly on the path to joy from love & lust, he's going to find himself on the pointy end of a sword in the final chapter, languishing at death's door.

Pondering how to write a sex scene, in a way that fits in with a rural crime novel, I've been reading other author's attempts at depicting love-making, frequently coming up against one particular word—'Afterwards'—this means that the lovers have just done it! There might have been some kissing and indications that they were in close proximity to one another, but definitely no commentary on what they did with their wobbly, wet and stiff bits!

I'm surprised that 'Afterwards' isn't in the dictionary meaning 'The time after sexual intercourse.' In my own writing, I intend to insert some descriptive details of what happens 'During'. :oops:
 
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New Show: The Binding of Isaac by Omri Boehm

The joy of mid-listing

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