What's Missing Here Is....

I am experiencing that rarest of occurrences: the much-desired but infrequently-experienced LULL.  So a good time to post.

The manuscript pickings have been slim lately.  I think agents and aspiring novelists have been querying less; partly because there's just less money to go around in general, and partly because the economic climate has everyone being highly cautious, especially in terms of taking chances on new writers.  (Though I hasten to add that I've been hearing some quasi-optimistic things lately about consumer confidence and the like, so here's to more of that type of news).

About the last dozen or so manuscripts/queries that I've read have elicited one reaction from me: "blah."  Almost all were competent and decent.  But what I realized is that most of them could be characterized by the things they did NOT have or did NOT do.  And when that thought hit me, I realized that I've been feeling this way about a lot of published work, too.

So, what has been missing?  In no particular order:

1. A vivid sense of place.  I don't think all novels have to be city in big, glamorous cities.  Small towns and suburbs are fine, too.  But I am a person who is pretty acutely attuned to place, and in so many manuscripts the "setting" is underdrawn.  It's almost like I could take Manuscript A, which is set in, say Portland, Oregon, and switch the location to Miami, Florida, and have it not make one bit of difference to the book.  I always feel like the setting  / locale is a key "character" in a story, and I'm not seeing a lot of places come to life lately.  Alas.

2. Originality.  I have to give mystery writers the credit they deserve.  Many of the manuscripts and cover letters that have come to me show me how much work/research their authors have done.  I get manuscripts whose titles should be "Generic Mystery with Features and Characters That Publishers Want."  I'm not seeing a lot rise above formula, and I need that bit of spark.  Of course, I don't want anything TOO crazy -- I have to keep readers' wants and needs in mind -- but I don't think I've thought, "Wow, that was really interesting and different" for months.

3. Suspense.   There are differing opinions on this, but I think a good mystery also has to be a good novel of suspense.  Some of the manuscripts I've read have been competently plotted, but they move at too leisurely a pace.  A common phenomenon is a strong beginning, followed by a sort of muddled middle in which nothing much happens, followed by a hasty conclusion where the crime is solved out of thin air or due to coincidence or hunch.  Suspense can be created by plot, but it can also be created equally well by character, and I'm finding the characters just too straightforward right from the beginning, not enigmatic enough to make me really want to keep reading to find out what makes them tick. 

4. Real relationships.  A lot of manuscripts put a cast of characters together for the purpose of the story but fail to build anything deeper than a superficial relationship between and among them.  Of course, not all relationships in all books can be described in all their complexity; we'd end up with something Proustian or Joyceian, and we really don't want that.  But I'd like to see more of the complexity that goes with any relationship, whether parent/child, husband/wife, boyfriend/girlfriend, friend/friend.  Friendships can be extremely complicated, with wide-ranging highs and lows, and yet so many characters in so many books seem to have so few friends.  Foils, yes--there are plenty of those.  Loners can be interesting, but I've seen rather too many of them lately and wouldn't mind a protag who is a wife, husband, friend, etc.

Comments

[L.M. Adams]

Sense of place is something I've also noticed that is missing. I picked up a mystery that was set in Washington, DC--the story focused on a murder in the Supreme Court. Since I live in the DC area, I was expecting it to have the look and feel of DC. Except for the Supreme Court, the setting could have been in any big city.

I always try to work the setting where I can in anything I write. In one of my last projects, as part of building the setting, I included details like the names of trees and bushes. I was a little concerned that I might have done it too much, but the setting got raves from people. Sometimes a little detail goes a long ways to building the setting.

L.M. Adams

[Jersey Jack]

My favorite crime writer is Elmore Leonard. A strong sense of place, as most description, is left out of his books, it seems to me. I wonder if strength in one or two areas might overcome weakness in others?