Use Your Profession to Build Emotion and Realism

7/21/2009

HOW TO USE EVERYTHING IN YOUR LIFE
(EVEN YOUR PROFESSION)
TO BUILD EMOTION AND REALISM
IN YOUR FICTION
By Lynde Lakes

A number of bestselling writers, like John Gresham for instance, hit the sought after top lists because they used facts and knowledge from their profession. The key is to change everything but the main issue and the emotion. Grab facts and then modify them beyond recognition. Change men to women, Latinos to Caucasians and heterosexuals to homosexuals. Add a murder or jealousy, or both. Then change the motive of revenge to greed. Make blondes, blonds, (i.e. females to males). Change the sexes and number of the children involved. If possible, move the location, Hawaii to the Philippines or Bahamas, or Los Angeles to New York. Use the key issue and write down how it played out—then change everything else, including the resolution.

Writers are sponges who soak up their surrounding and then go hunting for more. However, when a writer has spent years in college and elsewhere learning the ins and outs of a field and know the material like the back of their hand, perhaps it would be a wise step to use that professional expertise. An additional reason to use that expertise is to give the story a credibility that it may not otherwise have had. Readers like medical thriller by doctors and court cases by attorneys. They like stories about designers by people who know the business, have lived it, worked in it. They like cop, CIA or FBI stories by the professionals who have put their lives on the line.

This is an example showing how an attorney-author might change the facts of his/her case by retaining only the two main triggers, trailer and stress.

FACT: Someone had stolen a car in Seattle, then drove to Oregon, and stole a man’s trailer and all of his belongings while he was a breakfast. The police found the trailer in Redding, California abandoned with a flat tire. Now for the fiction: (Please pardon the guy’s language.)

FICTION: Attorney, Candice Cantrell looked across her clutter-less desk at the big Latino man with his arms crossed as though he were in a police interrogation. She glanced down at her tape recorder. With his permission, which he was hesitant to give, she was taping everything.

However, so far, Dominic had only told her that his marriage was broken and he wanted her to fix it.”

Alerted by his brusque answers, flushed face and a dark shifting gaze that screamed trouble, she took a breath and glanced at her watch.. “So you need an intermediary for a possible reconciliation?”

“Hell, no. I want a divorce, child custody and my damn trailer back!”

Finally, she had something to work with. “Your grounds?”

“My wife is nuts; didn’t you get that from the fact that she hired someone to steal my trailer? The bitch already has the house, but she wants to destroy me. She won’t let me see my daughter. She lied to cops and sent them to my jobsite to arrest me for slamming her head against the wall.”

“Did you do that?”

“Do I look like a guy who would do something like that?”

Actually, he did. Candice scribbled in shorthand that he hadn’t answered the question. She would come back to it later. “I had to ask. You’ve apparently had a lot going on and it’s natural to be stressed.”

“No shit?”

Candice felt the tension in the room soar several notches. To give him a chance to cool down, she decided to collect additional general information—she took down the preliminary information, names, addresses, possible witnesses. All the time he talked, he rattled something in his pocket. It sounded like solid steel juggling against solid steel. Suddenly he shifted and she saw the outline of a gun under his jacket.

Okay. The time is up. You can end with the gun. Point made. The key to using a writer’s profession is to change everything but the main issue and the emotion. Grab facts and then modify them beyond recognition. Wishing you excitement, emotion and realism in your writing so you, like Gresham or Gerritsen, can hit the bestsellers list. Aloha, Lynde