[Link] 100 Writing Prompts in the Crime Genre

by Jason Hellerman

Sometimes when I can't decide what I want to watch, I just run to any crime movie I have never seen before. I love the crime and gangster genre and think it contains some of the best movies of all time.

That's why I am so happy when I hear about a new version of these kinds of movies and TV shows being made.

But to get more movies and TV shows like these, we need scripts, and it's so hard to write them. I wanted to help give you a leg up. Use these prompts to jumpstart your creativity and get the pages flowing out of you.

If you’re staring at a blank page, here are 100 writing prompts categorized by crime subgenre to help you find your next "Big Score."

Let's dive in.

100 Crime Writing Prompts

The Professional Thief & Heist

• A retired safecracker is forced into one last job when his grandson accidentally steals from a mob boss.
• An elite heist crew discovers their getaway driver is a deep-cover FBI agent.
• A group of magicians decides to rob a casino using only "old world" stage illusions.
• The heist was perfect, but the "diamond" they stole is actually a high-tech tracking device.

Read the full list: https://nofilmschool.com/crime-gangster-writing-prompts

Mission Accomplished! Achievement Unlocked! A Novel in 8 Weeks!

Some of you who also follow my social media in addition to the blog may be aware that I have been working this summer to write my first novel. 

Surprising, right? Most people just assume that I've written novels with 35 years of professional writing behind me, but no, my career has primarily been in short stories with a few novelettes and even fewer novellas. So, for me, this was a big deal. 

I've started several novels before but never finished them. 

However, I'm thrilled to say that this one is done. Finished. Finito. The end. Over and out. 

If you've been a regular reader of the blog, you may also know that I use mock-up covers to help keep me focused and excited about my stories. For this new novel, called Another Dangerous Driver, here is the mock-up I put together. 

Not that I'd ever be one to try to get snotty or above my station as a write (/sarcasm), but my goal for this novel is to find not only a sweet spot between cozy and hard-boiled, but also to be as true to Fitzgerald's characters as possible and capture the social consciousness of Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes in terms of the treatment of women and minorities, sort of like Gary Phillips and Walter Mosley did with hard-boiled in their mysteries. That intersection of Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Langston Hughes is a tricky place to aim for. (And that means a lot of room to fail, sadly. We'll have to see.)

Just to tease you a bit, Another Dangerous Driver picks up the story of Jordan Baker, yes, THAT Jordan Baker from The Great Gatsby. During a golf tournament in Charleston, while trying to deal with the emotional fallout from what she called The New York Incident, and the subtle trauma it has triggered, she stumbles across a body floating in the water hazard that brings all the drama crashing back into her mind. Of course, when she is implicated in the crime, she must try to solve the mystery to clear her name. 

Folks, just in case you don't realize the magnitude of the joy I'm experiencing right now, I gave myself a goal to write a novel during my summer break. I'm a teacher and I get roughly eight weeks of summer break. I am pleased to say that it is done. 

I have graduated from novel starter to novel finisher. 

Viva la Sean! (And thanks, Jordan. I couldn't have done it if you hadn't been so much fun to write.)

Note: For those interested in the "behind the scenes" stuff, as I'm pictured Jordan Baker for the novel, I saw a lot more of Lois Chiles from 1974 than Elizabeth Debicki from 2013. A large part of that is because Debicki looks more like Miss Fischer, and if I see her that way, then that colors my voice when I write her. Her attitude also comes more from the 1974 film as well since Jordan's role was severely downplayed, in my opinion, in the 2013 movie -- regardless of how amazing the actress was. Of course, the bulk of the attitude comes from F. Scott Fitzgerald's book and my own speculation on how Jordan might have changed after the events of New York.

CS McKinney and the Off-Putting Aspects of Life

Writing stories about the unspoken and sometimes off-putting aspects of dating, romance, and life is CS McKinney's passion. With each book, he envisiosn the stories that feel familiar or connect with the reader on a certain level. By taking on the tough topics, he hopes to inspire others to find a life of love and happiness without having to make the same mistakes as the book characters.

When he's not writing, he enjoys competing in triathlons, playing music, and hiking.

Tell us a bit about your most recent work.

No Wrong, Just Write, is my latest publication. I decided to take a detour from writing novels to compile a step-by-step guide of how I write, publish and promote books. Many people have asked questions about my process, and in an effort to share this knowledge efficiently, I wanted to breakdown my thoughts into an easy-to-follow system.

What are the themes and subjects you tend to revisit in your work?

Romance and Mystery are my favorite genres to write. Inside of those areas, I find myself revisiting first loves and taboo topics the most.

Sunday Funnies: Running Out of Victims

[Link] All Hail the Long-Suffering Cadaver

by Amor Towles

Once at the center of the murder mystery, the cadaver has become increasingly incidental to the action and now figures as little more than a prop.

For over 100 years the cadaver, that unsung hero of murder mysteries, has been accommodating, gracious and generally on time. There is no other figure in crime who has proved more reliable. Since the murder mystery first gained popularity, there have been two world wars, multiple economic crises, dance crazes and moonshots, the advent of radio, cinema, television and the internet. Ideas of right and wrong have evolved, tastes have changed. But through it all, the cadaver has shown up without complaint to do its job. A clock-puncher of the highest order, if you will.

Meanwhile, many of our most revered detectives have proved rather difficult to work with. They have been variously arrogant, antisocial or persnickety. Witnesses have often been skittish or defensive. Many have intentionally sowed confusion through lies of omission or commission springing from their own sins and prejudices.

But decade in and decade out, the cadaver has remembered its lines and hit its mark. This despite the fact that it has borne the brunt of a thousand humiliations. Having been subjected to that most definitive form of violence, it has had to lie undiscovered, often in a cellar or back alley, overnight. Once the police arrive, our cadaver has been poked and prodded, its pockets emptied. After being shuttled to the morgue and laid out on a slab, it has been cut open, unceremoniously. Almost from the moment the corpse is discovered, it has been an object of slander. Family, friends and acquaintances who tended to be complimentary and discreet when our victim was alive are suddenly enumerating personal failings and sharing rumors of infidelity or financial malfeasance. And all of this — the loss of life, the autopsies, the recriminations — the cadaver has suffered in silence, on our behalf.

The cadaver’s unwavering professionalism is all the more admirable given the diminishment of its standing over time. If we look back to the so-called golden age of detective fiction, in the 1920s and ’30s, when the form was reaching its apotheosis in the works of Agatha Christie, the cadaver maintained an almost enviable status. After all, it was the cadaver who set the wheels of a mystery in motion.

The stories of the era tend to begin in a relatively benign and inviting manner. A small assembly of family members or friends might gather for the weekend in a rambling country manor. The setting and circumstances are not that different from what one might expect to find in a play by Chekhov or a novel by Henry James. That is, until, with the scream of a housemaid, the cadaver is discovered. Its sudden appearance sprawled on the study floor with a knife in its back is what transforms the book in our hand, taking us from the realm of domestic drama into that of the whodunit.

But in the golden age, the cadaver didn’t simply get things going. It maintained its position at the center of the story from the moment of its discovery until the denouement. As Hercule Poirot often pointed out, it was the psychology of the victim that was paramount. In life, was the cadaver lascivious? Unscrupulous? Greedy? To understand who had most likely monkeyed with the brakes of her car or poisoned her cup of tea, one first had to understand whom she had loved and whom she had spurned; whom she had enriched and whom she had cheated.

Read the full article: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/10/books/review/amor-towles-cadaver-murder-mystery.html

Motivational Monday: The Test of Your Power

Motivational Monday -- How to Write a Red Herring [Link]

By Tana French as told to Lila Shapiro

Tana French is an author of murder mysteries who is less concerned with whodunit than with the inner lives of her detectives. In her first book, In the Woods, which came out in 2007, she let what actually happened to a pair of vanished children remain a mystery because she didn’t think her detective was equipped to face the truth. French, a Dubliner who originally trained as a stage actor, has published six more books since, each one further cementing her reputation as a writer of “cultic devotion,” as The New Yorker put it.

The announcement of her latest, this spring, was met with feverish anticipation and a scramble for advance copies — the novelist Jeff VanderMeer pleaded on Twitter: “Who do I have to offer bird seed and bark butter to … to get an advance copy of the new Tana French?!” She’s famously good at a particularly eerie brand of red herring — that alluring detail that seems like the key to solving the crime, only to prove a clever bit of misdirection. In The Witch Elm, out this month, she breaks from her own convention by writing from the perspective not of a detective but of the victim of a crime. Still, the same rules apply: French’s red herrings are not just shiny lures but windows into her protagonists’ deepest fears and flaws. Here, she walks us through how she lays the tracks, starting with the red-herring masters she admires.

Read the full article: https://www.vulture.com/2018/10/tana-french-on-how-to-write-a-red-herring.html

Derrick Ferguson Kicked the Willy Bobo With Me...

Here's another off the bucket list. I kicked Derrick Ferguson right in the Bobo. Wait... That didn't come out right...

Derrick Ferguson: Who is Sean Taylor?

Sean Taylor: He’s just a man whose circumstances got beyond his control, beyond his control. I’m Kilroy. Okay, maybe not. ...

DF: What do you do to keep the creditors away?

ST: I’ve been everything from a corporate media strategist to a local newspaper editor, and I’ve written comics and short stories and even a novel thus far, but for the day job at the moment, I edit for several places as a freelancers/contractor to keep the bills paid. It’s a dirty job, as they say, but someone’s got to love it.

DF: How long have you been writing and what have you learned about yourself through your writing?

ST: My first magazine article was in 1991, a marketing article about doing a summer reading display for a bookstores to highlight summer book sales. It was a hit, and I kept doing it. My first short story was publishing in 1995 in O’ Georgia: A Collection of Georgia’s Newest and Most Promising Writers, and I caught the bug and haven’t stopped yet.

What have I learned? Well, I’ve learned how to survive close to the poverty line, that’s for sure. Writing and editing is one of those comes and goes industries, and in an economy as volatile as the U.S. one has been during the years I’ve been a writer and editor, it’s bounced up and down several time. But what I learned from all that is that writing is something I make time to do whether or not it’s paying the bills. It’s more a calling than a career choice.

Read the full interview: https://fergusonink.com/2018/05/08/kickin-the-willy-bobo-with-sean-taylor/