The Gift of Writing

I believe that writing can be a gift.

There are many authors who have given me the gift of writing. Every time I read a story that takes me out of my world and into theirs, I’m enjoying the gift of fantasy, mystery, make-believe, and even heart-stopping thrills. Those stories are their gift to me, and I am happy to accept them.

We’ve all heard people refer to certain authors as gifted writers. I will concede that there are some writers out there who, after just one novel, seem to have everything figured out. It appears to come easily to them… that they are gifted. But what we don’t see as the reader are the hours that went into honing their craft, sometimes for years before that big break turned them into an overnight success, making it all look easy.

From the perspective of the writer, those hours spent alone with just our thoughts, pen and paper, or a computer, are a labor of love. But easy is not the word most of us would use to describe any writing talent we may have.

In the same way a talented athlete possesses the passion that drives them towards perfection, a talented writer must also possess the passion for improving their writing skills. Because, like that athlete, raw talent will only blossom into greatness with practice. If there is a willingness to put in the work, then the possibility of being referred to as gifted exists.

For the writer, that passion is for the written word. Putting words together is easy. Putting the right words together can be difficult. Not quitting, even in the face of a total manuscript overhaul, takes resolve. The ability to breathe life into an idea by shaping the words into a story takes skill, and a determined mindset. When done right, the words flow, and the reader becomes absorbed in the narrative. But that passion and determination can also push us to keep reworking and trying to improve the storyline. So, we continue to rewrite the words. And although that may appear to keep us inspired, it can also lead to frustration preventing us from attaining that perfection. Sometimes the gift is to know when to leave well enough alone.

 Creative writing is a learned skill. The more you do it, the more you improve. Getting better at something you love doing, and then having the people you share it with appreciate it… well, that’s a gift in itself.

 There are many genres and many ways to tell a story. And we all do it differently. Of course, there can be similarities in styles and story plots, but that can be chalked up to like-minded people who enjoy writing about the same subject. But even two like-minded writers who work in the same genre will craft two completely different stories when given the same writing prompt, a difference that is also a gift as it helps us see things from each other’s perspective.

 As a reader, you may love one story and hate the other, but it doesn’t diminish the hard work and time spent by each author. It also doesn’t make one writer more gifted than the other. For every reader that falls in love with a book, there is another who doesn’t appreciate it for what it is. Readers who loved the book believe the author has a knack for telling a great story… is gifted, even. Readers who disliked the book may not have as high an opinion of that same author and won’t be a fan.

 Sometimes the gift is not in the ability to write amazing prose at all. Sometimes the actual gift is in an author’s ability to market their work. I’ve read some pretty terrific books by indie authors that most people have never heard of, and I’ve read some pretty mediocre books by authors that are media juggernauts.

 So, is writing a gift? That depends on how you look at it. There are writers and storytellers all over the world providing an escape through entertainment. When I’m writing, I get lost in my characters’ lives and can’t wait to see how it turns out. When I’m reading a good book, the same thing happens—I get lost in the characters’ lives and can’t wait to see how it turns out. I’m a fan. A devotee of both writing stories and reading stories written by others, and that, to me, is the actual gift of writing.  

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From Cartoonist to Writer

When I wore a younger man’s clothes I was enthralled by the color comic strips section in the Sunday paper. The smell of a fresh newspaper on a cold, crisp Sunday morning still takes me back to those long ago days when I was a boy. I couldn’t wait to dig into that wondrous wonderful world of the funnies. I’d lay out on the living room floor with my favorite comic strip characters spread out in front of me. I’d laugh at Dagwood while Blondie held open the front door as he rushed out to work in the morning, just to plow right into the mailman! My fingers would trace along the dotted line footsteps in the Family Circus as Jeffy or Billy took the longest route possible from their front door to the bus stop, only to be amazed when they missed the school bus. Watching Dennis the Menace antagonize Margaret or drive poor old Mr. Wilson crazy—that was always fun! And don’t get me started on all those adventure strips that used to dot the comic page landscape—Tarzan, Terry and the Pirates, Steve Canyon, and Johnny Hazard, just to name a few.  

But reading the funnies was only half the fun. The other half was the time I would spend drawing those comics in my trusty sketchbook. I would spend hours copying each line of each character in each strip until I had it perfect. Performing this ritual week after week taught me a lot about the mechanics of drawing cartoons, which led to me developing my own characters starring in my own comic strips. I tried for years to sell my cartoons to the big syndicates in New York, with no takers.

While I waited for a comic features editor at King Features, or Universal Press, or one of the other big houses to discover that they just couldn’t live without my talent, I drew cartoons for newspaper ads for a video electronics store. I also got one of my comic strips published in a local weekly paper in my hometown. These little snippets of success fueled my ambition to keep on trying to become a Professional Cartoonist. I spent years drawing and then submitting the fruits of my labor to the newspaper syndicates, looking for acceptance and affirmation that I was good enough to make it to the cartooning big leagues. Nothing happened… so eventually I broke down and started to concentrate on getting a real job.

Then one day, a buddy of mine approached me about drawing spot cartoon illustrations for a book he was writing. I met Dave Murray when I started work at one of those “real” jobs. We were selling TV, video, and audio equipment for a well-established local electronics store, and we were doing quite well. Dave was considered somewhat of an expert in the world of video and VCR’s and spent as much time helping his customers decipher the product manuals as he did selling the product. He had the idea that perhaps cataloging all that knowledge in book form would be a sellable idea—and he was right! Housetraining Your VCR: A Help Manual for Humans (1992, Grapevine Publications, Corvallis, OR) was the product of that knowledge. Dave, being a funny guy, peppered the book with light-hearted stories and anecdotes mixed in with the actual expert information, making for an enjoyable, fun read designed to help the ill-informed VCR owner easily setup and work their new-fangled recording/playback machines.

Finally! I was gonna be paid as a working professional cartoonist. It wasn’t a syndicated comic strip in the newspapers, but it was a start. Nothing could stop me now! I was on my way… as soon as the book was published, it would just be a matter of time before the syndicate boys would come knocking.

Ha! Although I had a lot of fun working on that project, it gave me a glimpse of what it takes to work with a publisher and their expectation of us helping to promote the book. We did radio interviews in different markets as well as book signings at local bookstores. It certainly gave us our fifteen minutes of fame, but the riches and the high dollar cartooning contracts I’d hoped for just never happened. But the book did go into a second printing, which included some updated information, as even back then, the technology was changing so fast that your VCR was obsolete almost before you even got it home from the store. It ended up being a big critical success (for Dave’s engaging, well written text), if not a big financial one.

Even though the financial rewards were not there for me as the illustrator, the reward I did reap was realizing what I really wanted to do, and that was to write a book of my own. I was an avid reader of PI Detective mysteries, so I decided that was the genre I would tackle. I wrote the first draft of Dead is Forever back in 1994, and then life got in the way. I did try to shop it around to agents, but the only takers were the type who wanted to charge me reading fees and copying costs to send out my manuscript to potential publishers. I ended up shelving the project for over twenty years before I dusted it off and got back to work. It was interesting reading through that draft and seeing how much had changed in twenty years. Since it wasn’t meant to be a period piece, I had to update things like substituting cell phones for pagers and landlines (although I did leave some of the landline phone conversations in the book), and changing out car models since a few I had used were no longer in production.

One of the best changes that came along during those twenty years was the advancement of the home computer and the invention of the internet, which of course allowed a company like Amazon to come into existence, eventually providing a platform for Indie Authors. Over the last couple of years, I’ve written many short stories and I have several book length stories I’m playing around with. However, my main focus for now is expanding the world of Tony Razzolito, the PI Detective in my books Dead is Forever, The Razzman Chronicles, and Deadly Passion – all available for Kindle download on Amazon.

I’m still a cartooning fanatic, and I will always manage to keep my toes dipped in the inkwell of the comic strip world in one form or another. But what I’ve discovered is that I really like to write. I enjoy crafting a good story and sharing it with anyone who is interested in reading it. I like to write more than I like to draw cartoons… and that’s saying a lot, because my younger self was convinced that I would be grinding out a daily syndicated comic strip for a living. Life still gets in the way, but I make sure I carve out the time needed to write every day. It’s important to me to keep working on my craft so that I will continue to improve, because I’ve decided that I’m in this writing thing for the long haul. 

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DEADLY PASSION: A Tony Razzolito PI Story (The Razzman Files Book 2) http://amazon.com/dp/B07C29GK9R … via @amazon

Two women dead: One a twenty-year-old cold case, the other brutally fresh.  

PI Tony Razzolito pieces together long forgotten clues as he tries to solve the twenty-year-old murder of a young high school grad, that is somehow linked to a recent brutal killing. But as he works through the list of suspects, he finds himself battling the seasoned homicide detective who couldn't solve the murder the first time around.

Can the two forge a partnership long enough to solve both murders, or will their egos prevent a killer from being caught? 

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Accuracy in the Details 

Do readers always expect accuracy in the details when they are reading a book of fiction? Would they even know the difference if you were inaccurate? Well, I guess that depends on what and where you are writing about. We’ve all seen enough police dramas or the inside of hospitals on TV that the expectation for what these should reasonably look like has already been set. Put your own spin on it and you’re good to go. But most medical dramas or police procedurals, to be accurate, need a certain vocabulary or interaction between doctors or lawyers or detectives that call for specific information to be included to advance the story properly. Unless you grew up in or are currently a part of those worlds, doing research is essential to the believability of the story. If your story or series is set in a real place—city, state, or country—you can take some liberties but overall you must be accurate. Readers love being able to recognize real neighborhoods, street names and landmarks while enjoying your book. If you are too far off the mark, you run the risk of not being added to their future must read list.

But what if the world you’re writing about just passes through one of these other worlds? Maybe your protagonist interacts with the police or a doctor, but only briefly and is just a small part of the story. Perhaps your characters are driving through a city or town that’s not integral to the overall story but is still necessary to help the reader connect the dots. Do you still spend the time to be as correct as possible with that interaction, no matter how brief? I think you should. With the internet there is no reason not to try and be as exact with certain details as possible. Now, don’t misunderstand… of course there should be a certain amount of embellishment, we are writing fiction after all. But there is nothing wrong with having that fictional business located on a real street with real landmarks around it.

I realize that I am not telling any writer worth their salt anything that they don’t already know or do, this is really more of a reckoning for me more than anything else. I have only been writing seriously for a couple of years. I’ve had stories rattling around in my head that I had to get down on paper for many years, but I really didn’t worry about the accuracy or consistency of details since they were not being read by anyone other than me. 

But that all changed as I began to write my PI Detective series. I use the backdrop of both my hometown of Syracuse, New York and my current home for the last twenty-three years, Charlotte, North Carolina. They say to write about what interests you and what you know, and I know Syracuse and Charlotte. I was interested in writing PI stories because I enjoyed reading them, so I had been doing my research without even knowing it just by reading great PI fiction by extremely talented authors, and growing up and living in the cities I chose as the canvas to paint my stories on.

However, I can’t see building and more importantly, sustaining a PI series unless I’m willing to have my characters grow over time. And to me, that means having them solve cases beyond their comfort zone and with some bite to them. Perhaps the investigation will take them to different locations or into unfamiliar territory needed for them to solve the case they’re involved in. For that to happen, I have to be willing to put the time in and research either via the internet, maybe a text book, or even seeking out the information or advice of an expert. For example – One of the short stories in The Razzman Chronicles takes the main character, Tony Razzolito to Jamaica in pursuit of the bad guy. Jamaica became an integral part of the story, but the problem for me was that I’d never been to Jamaica. I spent a lot of time making sure I researched and had the details right on where Tony went while in Jamaica. I had people I know who had been there read the story and they helped me along where the internet couldn’t. In the end, I feel I have a pretty good portrayal of the areas where Tony spent his time. 

I am currently writing the third book in the Razzman Files, Tony Razzolito PI series, and it is taking Tony into the world of NASCAR and illegal street racing—two things that I know very little about. I am knee deep in crossing my T’s and dotting my I’s when it comes to being true to the racing world. Considering I live in one of NASCAR’s biggest backyards, I’d better get it right if I’m going to venture into their world. What makes this one such a challenge is that I’ve never been a big racing fan, but so far it’s been a fun journey taking my characters down a new and different path. 

These last couple of years have been an eye opening experience. There is much more to writing than just plopping down words on paper, or in my case, a computer screen. It takes work, hard work at times, to ensure that we are putting out the best product we can. Whether you’re writing in a complete fantasy world or your entire story takes place in a city here on earth, consistency and accuracy in the details will keep the story humming along and the readers satisfied.

*The above is simply my opinion and based only on my own experiences

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Truth in Fiction 

Whenever I read the words, Based on a True Story or Ripped from the Headlines on the cover of a fiction book, my mind immediately starts trying to connect the dots. What’s real? Have I heard about the events the author is writing about? Is the True Story or the Headline an account of something about the author’s life or is it an event that the author was simply captivated with enough to write about? And if I had heard of the subject or event being written about, did the author do all the research necessary for me to not be judgmental as I read the story within the pages?

Whew! Seems like a lot going through my head before I even read the first word. But if you’re anything like me, you eat these kind of books up. Even though the author has made it clear that the book is a work of fiction that was based on a true story or event, I can’t help but be fascinated by the ‘this really happened’ element of the story.

But what about other fiction? I believe that there is truth hidden between the pages of every fiction book. A good story is produced by the blood, sweat, and tears of an author who slaved away for hours hunched over their computer, making stuff up. However, as that creative soul is at full throttle, typing furiously with calloused, numb hands, the story flowing from those fingertips has been influenced by everything the writer has ever seen or done in their life, and every person they’ve ever known or observed—whether they realize it or not. I know this to be true when I write. I craft my stories using bits and pieces of places I’ve lived, cities and towns I’ve visited, and mannerisms and attitudes of people I’ve known or observed over my lifetime. I may not even notice it when I’m deep into the storyline, but I sure see it when I’m going through the editing process. Sometimes it’s even on purpose. When I need something added to a character in the story that I just can’t get right, I may go out to a restaurant, walk through a park, go to a mall—anywhere I will be able to see people in action, just so I can spark inside my head what I need to bring that character to life in a way that is eluding me. I have even heard of some writers who will visit chat rooms and forums, and introduce controversial subjects, or take the opposite platform in a discussion, just to see the reactions brought forth by the people participating in the forum conversations. I can bet that in some form, those real reactions and bits of conversation have made their way into those author’s fiction books. One of the best compliments I received lately was from someone who told me that they loved the characters in my books. She said that they felt like real people, that she could actually see these conversations and interactions taking place. That, to me, is truth in fiction. The dialog may be made up, the situations may be pushing beyond reality, but the little nuances and mannerisms that make up the characters are based on real live people… even in those books about witches and vampires, there is an element of truth in personality to the characters that most likely came from bits and pieces of real people in those author’s lives.

So the next time you are reading a fictional book by one of your favorite authors, remember that no matter how mild or wild the story may be, there is probably a little bit of a Based on a True Story element weaved within those pages simply because the writer is a living, breathing, person, making up stories that are influenced, even if subconsciously, by their life experiences.

** The above is simply my opinion and is based on no facts whatsoever… you could even say it’s a work of fiction :)

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