Bev Jackson has awarded me the Shameless Lion Award. This award originated with Seamus Kearney of Shameless Words and the Shameless Lion Writing Circle, who wrote:

“Those people I’ve given this award to are encouraged to post it on their own blogs; list three things they believe are necessary for good, powerful writing; and then pass the award on to the five blogs they want to honour, who in turn pass it on to five others, etc etc. Let’s send a roar through the blogosphere!” (read award details here)

I’m always happy to give a loud roar for good writing, and I agree with Seamus’ three things — innnovation, truth, and humanism — to which I’ll add three more things I think are necessary for good, powerful writing:

1) Love of learning. I’m not talking about the letters after your name. Love of learning (call it natural curiosity if you will) makes the writer a sponge for details from which to draw just the right ones. Love of learning makes us thorough researchers, who sometimes need a 12-step program to get us to stop researching and write. It keeps us open to new ways of telling a story and to experimentation and practice. One never finishes learning.

2) Awareness, including empathy. Awareness of the world around us helps a writer catch those fleeting details that make a story come to life. There’s a whole world inside a story, and the writer’s awareness of her outer world helps her select just the right details to make the world of the story seem real. A great writer also understands people and their feelings, and can stand in another’s shoes and experience their perspective. Of course we never do this perfectly, as each person’s experience is unique; but a powerful writer comes oh so close.

3) Courage. A powerful writer must be willing to take risks, to face conflict head on, to take up subjects others may be afraid to tackle. Sometimes the risk is writing about an issue personal to the writer, a past trauma, or something the people in her life may not be happy that she writes. Sometimes it’s a matter of getting a character to a conflict instead of writing circles around it. Sometimes it’s an artistic risk, writing in a style or form that’s new and untested, or on a topic that’s unpopular or politically charged. To illustrate this, I’ll quote yet another line from a movie, The Thomas Crown Affair (1999). (Warning, if you haven’t seen the movie this setup may be a spoiler.) Detective Michael McCann, played by Denis Leary, presses insurance investigator Catherine Banning (Rene Russo) for information about their art theft suspect, Thomas Crown (Pierce Brosnan), who’s also at this point Catherine’s lover. Catherine hesitates, and the detective says, “You know what? Life is full of shitty conflicts, okay? Give!” That line encapsulates for me the power of conflict and risk-taking in writing. It has to be there for writing to be powerful, and the writer has to face it head-on. Give!

Now for the people I want to award with a Roar. For starters, I wish I could pass this award right back to Bev for her poem, To My Young Husband, 1963.

Here’s my list:

1) Cate at Trailing Light
2) Susan at Spinning
3) Bruce Black at Wordswimmer
4) Eric Mayer at Byzantine Blog
5) Wayne at Nutty Steamers

There, five! I won’t have to cheat, in fact I could’ve gone on. In closing I want to point to Bev’s new art gallery website, Art Shack Studio.

We live in a filthy world of our own making, mostly made filthy through our mental twists on reality. It seems strange to me sometimes that when we’re out in wild places no amount of dirt seems out of place, yet in our neighborhoods and especially in our houses it can feel as if the whole of nature is intent on affronting our sense of cleanliness and order. Though my sense of order is weaker than some, I know everyone who lives indoors develops some degree of this need for order. Even the cat, to whom the state of her litter box and blankets matters a great deal, and the dog, who will go through all kinds of personal agony to wait to go outside to perform certain functions (thank God—or should that be Dog), and who gets nervous when I rearrange furniture in the living room. They like their people to be securely in place, too. He got so he knew the sound of my suitcase zipper when I used to travel for work, and would come into the bedroom when he heard it, to give me this look that made me feel like the worst kind of traitor. They both seem to go into fits when we so much as drive to the store, if we’ve been home a lot and they’ve grown used to that. When we return they greet us as returning heroes, and later the dog ceremoniously sniffs the soles of our shoes as if to learn where we’ve been—the usual places, or somewhere strange and exotic?

Orderliness is important to all of us who live under the umbrella of civilization. Not so much in nature, where a broken branch may hang by a thread for two seasons before falling to the ground and lying there for several more, gradually contributing its substance to the soil—what the ants don’t carry away or the termites consume. Maybe that’s order, too, in its way, and our skewed notion of order twists our perception of what is out of place, what must be plucked or added to the woodpile, burned in here so it doesn’t burn or rot out there.

The work of an artist or a writer requires some residual sense of the disorder in nature. A Japanese gardener calculates his design to mimic nature, if in a scrupulous, disorder-bending fashion. A painter avoids symmetry in her compositions. Some of the most amazing paintings I’ve seen depict skies full of drama rather than peace, states of cloud that in real life would make me wish we had a storm cellar. My favorite part of any piece of music is often full of drama, that exquisite break after a heart-rending crescendo. A writer fills his story with conflict, unresolvable problems and sympathetic characters full of flaws who perform acts we would never consider in real life. Why do we love this in artwork? Deep down, do we know everything isn’t supposed to be orderly all the time?

What is all this fuss over cleanliness and order? Can we carry it too far? Is that the reason that now, when our indoor world is in many ways its most orderly, we crave violence in the movies—and it increases in the streets? Is our twisted sense of order what makes us think we should control which two consenting adults marry, and push our religious or political agendas on others? Is it what makes us build walls at borders and regulate language? Is it what makes some people hoard wealth? Is it behind addiction and pornography?

Should order stop at the walls of our own houses? Is order’s purpose simply to help us feel secure in the future of meals to come, fresh water to drink, mortgages paid up? Do we try to make it fool us into thinking we’ll never die? Does it mimic the cycles of the seasons, the regularity of rainfall and harvest? Did order arise along with agriculture? Or did we find it in the vast movement of stars as we navigated seas full of monsters? What is it about order that lends us so much peace that we grow irritable or confused without it? Why do we grow a little insane from too much of it? Does it carry a deeper meaning? Is God order, or is God chaos? Or is God both, a balance, yin and yang? Where should we draw the line? Should there be a line?

Maybe I’ll draw the line today at leaving the vacuuming for tomorrow. It’s late, getting hot out, time to close the windows. Or is that too orderly, keeping the heat out and the cool in? I need to find my balance.

But rules of writing aren’t the rules I’m concerned with breaking, at the moment.

What I’m puzzling over is how many rules a sleuth can get away with breaking within the confines of a mystery. Especially a sleuth who’s characterized as an honest, law-abiding citizen, as a particularly ethical person, or as a by-the-book law enforcement officer. I’m concerned about a sleuth I want to bring back in the next story in a series, rather than have him wind up in jail or out of work.

I have a dilemma. This character of mine is honest, sometimes to a fault. He’s a good guy, the kind you want your daughter to marry. But he may have to break some rules, in this story, and possibly tell some untruths. I find I have trouble even proposing that he do either. It’s something in me, perhaps, the part of me in which this character originates. I’m not a rule breaker. I’m a boring, goodie-two-shoes rule follower, and that trait may be in danger of keeping my characters too honest for their own good.

Now I’m picturing Adrian Monk, holding onto an assistant by the belt while the younger man leans as far as possible into someone’s home, to avoid stepping inside because they have no legal right to be there. That’s a classic illustration of how far rule breaking can stretch in a mystery.

The sub-genre makes a difference. The hard-boiled or noir sleuth can surely get away with worse behavior than a respected one in a traditional mystery. The question of drama comes into play, too. The noir sleuth’s bad behavior is expected, while the other’s isn’t. Some cozy sleuths seem to get away with almost anything as long as it’s funny.

The stakes are important, too. Elizabeth George’s Sergeant Barbara Havers threatened a superior with a gun—when a child’s life hung in the balance. She didn’t get away with this behavior without any repercussions at all, but we didn’t find her turning in her badge and standing in an unemployment line in the next book, either.

Clearly there are a lot of questions I have to ask myself before allowing my sleuth to break the rules, whether it’s her personal ethics or the law of the land:

What are the stakes?
How far out of character is this action?
What consequences—or lack of consequences—can I expect the character to face?
How will the consequences of this action affect the rest of the story?
How will they affect the character’s place in future stories?
How far will readers let me go before they can no longer suspend disbelief?
What rules have I established for the story so far, and how far do I already stretch reality?
What code of ethics does the character usually live by, and how does he justify breaking his own rules?
Do I need to raise the stakes?

This is the aspect of fiction writing that gives me a headache. Maybe I’m too honest. Maybe my character is. Maybe I underestimate the amount of conflict and drama this behavior will provide. Maybe the conflict and drama lie in the internal struggles more than in the actions that follow. Maybe the reader could care less whether a real person in this character’s place would do this, or could get away with it. They just want an entertaining story. Maybe I’m second-guessing myself too much. Maybe I should just sit down and write the thing, and damn the consequences.