The Plot Thickens

I like to write linear stories, ones that follow a strict time sequence.

That pattern makes sense from a first person POV, since the character lives in a forever now. I don’t have the luxury of jumping to simultaneous goings-on with other characters, where I can relive a moment from multiple points of view. I can’t sneak into the heads of other people to spell out their thoughts, evil or otherwise. Frank Healy has to infer things from their faces, from their body language. He has to be VERY observant.

Time shifts are possible and sometimes necessary to fill in the back story. Frank Healy’s sense of morality is tainted by unhappy episodes from his childhood. On the off chance that any of you haven’t read the books (Most of you haven’t. Shame!) I won’t detail exactly what happened. Suffice it to say that in moments of great stress, he is transported back to those moments. Those memories haunt his dreams, too. He is reluctant to talk about his past because he is ashamed of what happened, but it does come out obliquely. When he tells stories the storytelling is still in the present. When his nightmares come back to haunt him, they are still in his present sleep.

My problem is that crime fiction often requires multiple storylines to sustain the narrative.

That isn’t really a problem. Life IS complicated. Things come at us from all directions, and we have to deal with them as they hit us. In a story, those random events are more easily arranged to fit the narrative. I can conveniently string events together with the right frequency to keep multiple story lines running and readers interested.

The next issue is relatedness. Life is essentially random, and as often as not, the only thing connecting the different aspects of our lives is that they are happening to us. If your boss is a jerk and your affair is getting stale and the IRS is auditing you, chances are that there is no connection between those events. UNLESS your boss is having an affair with your girlfriend, too, and she’s the one who reported your bookie business to the feds.

I have even more grandiose ambitions: I want the essential story elements to drive an entire series of (potentially) ten books or so. I have four written, with two in “print” as eBooks. I want to sustain a small cast of characters, most of whom are Frank’s friends and acquaintances from college. I have goings-on inside a prosperous (at least initially) car company, I have Frank’s relationship with the wealthy but elusive Lucy Firenze. There are certain chemical compounds that cause trouble whenever they appear in the story. And of course, Frank is ambitious. He wants to nurture and protect his career.

These pieces form a framework for a grand narrative, an arc that spans forty years. The downside is that the antagonists, according to Frank’s moral code, have to die. Their crimes have to be sufficiently egregious to deserve death. Michigan has never had a death penalty, so Frank is on his own there. Unfortunately for me as the architect of this scheme, I need to keep coming up with new bad guys without depopulating either the car company or southeast Michigan. And in keeping with the grand narrative, I like to introduce them into the storyline at least one book before I kill them off.

The plots are set in the context of the times and social issues that have swept over all of us in the last fifty years: racial injustice and equality, feminism, AIDS, safety regulation, energy crises, you name it.

If that wasn’t enough, I try to include landmarks, figures and events from around metro Detroit, to add local color that ties my fictional Paris, Michigan to the real communities nearby.

Life I complicated. 

All these people, places, things and ideas have to crash over Frank Healy personally. He can’t just read about them in the paper, like the rest of us do. How boring would that be?

Like J. K. Rowling, I have to keep this all in my head against the day when it all bears fruit in death, destruction, justice and book sales.

Don’t hold your breath. I’m still working on it.