A Guest post by Charlie Kondek

Recently, I’ve been able to spend time talking with other writers about how we come up with crime stories, and it’s really helped articulate my process. I’ve been sharing my ideas with Judy as we and other contributors to the new Superior Shores anthology, Midnight Schemers & Daydream Believers, work to promote it. She was kind enough to invite me to share my thoughts here at her blog.

I think for many writers, crime stories have two primary drivers. One is a mood the writer wants to capture, maybe a moment or an image. A granite-jawed PI making his way down a shabby corridor. Two hoods sharing a cigarette and meditating on honor before a showdown. The ache of longing a protagonist feels for a femme fatale that propels him toward doom. It may be common or it may be unique, may come from the movies or our own experience or imagination, but whatever it is, it starts as ephemeral inspiration.

The other driver is plot, the actual scenario that will coordinate getting the characters to the moment we envision. For crime stories, plot comes from constantly thinking about crimes, the nature of them, the details of how they happen. Why do people murder, we wonder? Why do they steal? What do they steal? How does extortion work? How do lawbreakers get caught, or not get caught?

These two drivers don’t necessarily happen in order, they may even happen concurrently, but I believe crime stories result from their wedding. They feed off of and inform each other, create the opportunities and insights that make a story unique and uniquely ours. And they may surprise us. Often, it’s as if the characters come to life and start making decisions on their own, possibly derailing some aspect of the story. Having come to know them in our imaginations, we write them intuitively, and they take us places we didn’t know they could, say things we didn’t know they would. That can be a very pleasant discovery.

Having said all that, though, here’s a kicker:

I think there’s a third driver to a story, and it’s this: the aspect of the emerging story the writer finds most interesting and where he orients his attention. I’ve been able to give this a lot of thought, too, an area of ongoing examination in my own work.

I’m a religious person, and see my Christian faith as central to my writing, even or especially when writing about something as nasty as crime. I’m always trying to find the godly in what I do, and focus the lens of religious scrutiny on the characters’ motives, actions and the consequences of those actions. Put another way, God is always a character in my stories, and in a crime story, God can be recognized or rejected, obeyed or ignored. Sometimes I’m able to make this explicit, and sometimes, merely implicit. Sometimes I try to express the godly in my stories by showing the absence of God in the minds of my characters. In any case, as I’m trying to raise the tent of my story, that’s where I pin the stakes.

For others, it may be different. It may be a region or setting that’s most interesting, or the subculture in which the characters live. It may be a type of character, a type of crime, a commitment to a sub-genre, or a desire to comment on current affairs or history. Whatever it is, I think these are the three things that drive crime stories: inspiration + plot / the writer’s particular interest. Notice I emphasized crime stories. I think for other types of stories, there may be different drivers, but that’s a whole other essay.

www.books2read.com/midnight-schemers

READERS: What do you think? Does this describe your experience? I’d love to hear your thoughts! And be sure to check out my story, “Secretly Keith” in Midnight Schemers & Daydream Believers to see if I applied my own formula. And because it’s fun to share, here are the first two paragraphs:

“Big” John Warmer was not a big man, unless you counted his stomach, a characteristic he not only failed to conceal but to which he drew attention by wearing t-shirts a size too small. Equally mismanaged was his hair, bald except for the ring below his crown, which he kept long in a so-called “skullet.” A ridiculous dark mustache complemented this and, with Big John’s propensity for wearing Levis and cowboy boots, sleeveless flannel shirts and trucker hats, he looked like he’d stepped right out of The Dukes of Hazzard. “Warner?” someone would ask, meeting him for the first time. “Your name’s Big John Warner?”

“Warmer,” he would correct. “As in, ‘you’re getting warmer.’” He was the local bookie at Fleet’s, a working man’s bar in Westland.

Charlie Kondek is a marketing professional and short story writer from metro Detroit whose work has appeared in genre, literary and niche publications, including anthologies by Superior Shores Press. He is a member of the Short Mystery Fiction Society. More at CharlieKondekWrites.com.