JUST DO IT!!
By Kelly Lange

For more years than I care to admit, (Yeah, yeah, I know, you can look it up on the Net) I have been a newswriter . That was my job right out of college. Writing the who, what, where, when, and why, of what is usually a very bleak terrain. I ascended from being one of the dozen or so ink-stained wretches in L.A.'s KABC radio newsroom to radio reporter, then to television news reporter at KNBC in Los Angeles, then television news anchor at that station for more than two decades. And during it all, I was writing news. Banging it out, as we said in the sweaty Channel Four newsroom.

And speaking of the Internet, can you believe how lucky we are to live in an age with such a magnificent, incredible, indispensable tool? Not to mention the computer itself. Pure magic! I mean, think about Shakespeare. He had a day job, he ran a hat shop. At night he had to deal with actors. Try to get them to memorize his immortal passages, get the dialog right, and render it meaningfully on stage at the Old Globe. All the while trying to keep a mob of illiterate, un-washed drunks quiet in the seats. Then he had to open up his shop early the next morning and peddle his top hats, silk gloves, and ascots, while spending the time between customers rewriting the play he had up and penning new plays. And now and then dashing off sonnets just to feed his soul while immersed in the crass commercialism of showbiz. And as we all know, old Will prolifically turned out the very best prose, poetry, and plays the world has ever known. Did he have a computer? No, he had a messy little pot of ink and a feather.

And you, dear writer and prospective writer, think you have it tough. So if you have the heart and soul of a writer and you're not doing it, or you're not doing enough of it, know that Will Shakespeare, putting on his plays up there in the heavens these days starring the likes of Lunt and Fontaine, a bunch of Barrymores, Gable, Bogart, Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn and the rest, is disappointed in you.

Hence my title. Just Do It!! You know the phrase; now get the tee-shirt. My genre is mysteries. How come you ask, my being a woman who has written serious news for most of her adult life. The reason is, I love a mystery. Love the puzzle. Truly respect the writer who can keep me guessing. And I've read them all, from our own great L.A. noir writers like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Ross McDonald, along with Agatha Christie and the Brits, on up to present day mystery mavens like Sue Grafton, Robert Crais, Michael Connelly, Jonathan Kellerman, and the many other terrific scribes who dabble in "deadly ink."

Among other shows, I anchored the nightly "Eleven O'clock News". That meant when we wrapped and Jay Leno came on, our whole staff trooped out of the control booth and off the set and lumbered upstairs to the newsroom.

There, we had the meeting about what went wrong with the show (which meeting was usually longer than the show), discussed story ideas for the next day, did our archiving, wound down with maybe a glass of wine and some industry gossip, then rolled home from work at sometime around two in the morning. Wired! Couldn't go to sleep! Who drops off to sleep as soon as they get home from work? They have dinner. A movie. Playtime with the kids. Their favorite television shows. Some kind of fun activity between work and bedtime as a reward for working hard all day. But at two in the morning, there's no one to play with.

So I would read. Mysteries. Until my eyes shut down of their own weight, the book slipped out of my hands, and my head hit the pillow. And in the course of more than twenty years, I found that it took longer and longer for my eyes to close. Very often the silver-gray light of dawn was streaming through the windows before my book clunked to the floor.

Then one day, sometime in the mid- nineties, the proverbial cartoon lightbulb went on over my head. "There has to be a way," I suggested to myself, "to more productively spend the wee hours between work and the morning light than inhaling mystery novels. How about writing one?"

"Excuse me?" answered myself with incredulity. "I don't have a clue how to write a mystery novel." (No pun intended.) "Oh stop whining," myself scolded. "Just do it: Hmmm. Well, okay then.

And I started. Now, as old Will would put it, there's the rub. Actually starting. How in Hades do you do that? Well, starting something has never been a big problem for me because my role model is my mom, who turned 98 on December 6th, and spent Christmas morning shoveling off the driveway because family was coming to dinner and they needed to be able to park, she said. (Remember the blizzard in the northeast last December?) "Mom," said I on the phone from sunny California, "there are people who shovel." "Not on Christmas Day ," said Alice, quite practically. She taught us kids to dive into whatever had to be done. She was the mother of just do it.

So at close to two in the morning of the day I'd designated to start devoting those two, three, sometimes four or even five hours writing instead of reading, I sat at my computer in my home office. I don't remember what I wrote that night, something like, "It was a dark and stormy night," probably. But soon I was creating characters, putting them in situations, having them run amok, murder each other, and so forth, night after night, and just simply having a ball doing it.

Until my head hit not the pillow, but the keyboard. It worked for me. (Yes, I got a few bruises in the process, but nothing that couldn't be covered up with television makeup to go on camera the next day.)

Well, after a few months I'd completed half of my very first mystery novel. "Wow ," I'd said to myself, "this is pretty good." So I took it to my television agent here in LaLa Land, who sent it to a literary agent in New York, who gave it to his contacts at Simon & Schuster.

Now, let me tell you what advantages a red hot Los Angeles television news queen anchorwoman (and modest besides) has in the publishing canyons of New York: None. Nada. Zip.

"So what?" was the response to my brilliant (I thought) half a book from the moguls at Simon & Schuster. " Anyone can start a mystery ," they carped to my brand new literary agent. "But can she finish it? Can she make it a page-turner. Make the reader care about every character, love them or hate them passionately? Can she lay the clues and arrows down in the right places all along the way without giving anything away? And bring it all together in a big, boffo finish that is altogether satisfying? And that doesn't cheat the reader? Like not having Martians or some such revealed as having done the crime in the last chapter, or an equally out-of-left-field solution. Can she do that?" they asked.
"Can you?" asked my hopeful new literary representative. "Of course," said I. With my fingers crossed behind my back

Because the real answer was: Of course I didn't have a clue. (Oops, there's that word again.) But I wasn't about to admit that. That came from Alice, too. Never let them see you doubt." Act as if you know exactly what you're doing," my mom would tell us kids, "and they'll think you do." "Then you'd better quick figure out what 'you're doing," she would always add. And in fact, that's my sleuth Maxi Poole's (The Reporter; Dead File) maxim too, and it came down to Maxi and me directly from Alice. To wit, here's a verbatim passage from chapter three of my new novel, Dead File:

Maxi put one of her personal aphorisms in play: Act like you know exactly what you're doing, and people will think you know exactly what you're doing. She walked purposefully past cubicles to Gillian Rose's suite, then brushed by the unoccupied desk of Gillian 's assistant to the open door of the inner office, blocked off, now, by a double strip of yellow crime-scene tape. Although there'd been no specific mention of it in the wire story, the police were treating this death as a crime} Maxi noted. She peered over the tope. A few feet to the right of a brood, black slate-topped desk, the body of Gillian Rose lay crumpled on the floor...

I guess it's no big surprise that my sleuth, television reporter-anchor Maxi Poole, is a lot like me. Except she's younger, taller, thinner, sexier, and blonder than me. Hey, she's my sleuth, right? She can be exactly what I want her to be. That's part of the fun of writing. Have trouble sticking to your diet? Put your character on the diet. She'll live on it, and she'll always be svelte and gorgeous, no sweat. Oh, she'll exercise, of course. She'll sweat. But no sweat for you, I mean. That's one of the reasons why writing fiction all night, after writing news all day, is so much fun for me.

For instance, you write a news story. It comes over the Associated Press wire that So-and-So has been found dead. Maybe murdered. You're assigned to the story for the "Six O'clock News". That's when you start to sweat, because from the second you're assigned, you're on deadline, and you'd better not miss it. The story has to run on the news that night.

First, you sit at your desk and make phone calls. To the officers who found the body. To the homicide detectives on the case. To the medical examiner at the coroner's office. To witnesses whose names you pick up in your investigating. To family members, with great delicacy. To friends of the victim, co-workers, bystanders. And more. Maybe twenty phone calls before you can grab your camera crew and go out to the scene and roll tape. On everything and everybody around.

Then you rush the cassettes back to the station, and you write what you know about what happened. What you've been able to find out. Next, you voice your track in the recording studio, and take that audio track and the videotape into an edit bay where you winnow down, cut the pictures you've shot to layover the story you wrote, dropping in "sound" that you've been able to gather from the cops, the family, the witnesses, anyone you could get to talk on tape.

Final step, you write your ins and outs. Then you're ready to go on the air with it. Either on the set, or live from. the scene.
Oh, and you'd better look halfway decent, by the way...better get to hair and makeup, or at least powder down, dab on some lipstick, and run a brush through your hair, because the viewer will notice. I can't tell you how many calls, letters, and e-mails I've gotten in response to a story I was particularly proud of, saying, "Really, Kelly, can't you get yourself a decent hair style?"

That's what I do in my day job, and that's what my sleuth Maxi Poole does in my books. (Of course, Maxi is even busier than me, because she also has to solve the crimes.) But in my lone nighttime hours, as I sit at my computer at three, four in the morning, while the devil Santa Ana winds are howling through our L.A. canyons, and the hungry herds of coyotes are howling in our hills (okay, of Beverly), and I'm writing fiction, I get to just make it up! How liberating.

How many bodies? They're my bodies, so I can have as many bodies as I want. How did they get murdered? It's my murderer, so they get murdered any way I want to murder them. I remember once asking my friend, the great Sue Grafton, if she thought offing my victim in a deep sea situation trapped in a submarine which the murderer had managed to sabotage and got the vic trapped in a pressure suit so nobody on board would notice that he wasn't breathing, etc. etc. etc., would work. Said Sue, "Oh, just shoot him." But I digress.

What did being a smart, glitzy, popular (and, as I said, modest) television news anchorwoman get me in the publishing world? A big leg up? No, (as I also said), it got me bupkis. "A glitzy beginning does not a novel make," pontificated the powers-that-be at Simon & Schuster to' my beleaguered literary agent. "Let her finish it, then show us."

Did that deter your creative, hard- working, (and very modest) novelist-in-training? No, of course not. The fact is, I have always been way too thick skinned to take no for an answer. Like when I was trying to get a job in television news. Think that's easy? Especially when you majored in Shakespeare in college. "We don't do the news in Old English," I heard from one suit as he perused my resume. "Ha ha ha," said I, appropriately kissing up.

Needless to say, I didn't get that job. Or about forty others I applied for . But did that stop me? Like I said, too pigheaded to ever take no for an answer. You throw enough mud...But wait. I digress again.

So I wrote, and I wrote... and I blew the house down. Just kidding. I wrote, and I wrote, and I finished my novel, Trophy Wife. And my still new, still faithful literary agent brought it back to the people at Simon & Schuster. And they published it. Can you believe it? I couldn It! But Alice could. And did. "I knew you could do it, honey ," she said. I want to be her when I grow up.

Some of my tips to take you from germinating ideas at Deadly Ink, to going home and actually doing it, to selling it and getting it into print: Write every day. Even if it's just a few sentences. And even if they're awful. You'll come back to it, improve, expand, polish, and push onward. If you let more than a day go by without diving into your fictional world, pretty soon it'll be a week, then a month, then you'll forget what the heck you were writing about. It's like exercise. Every day, even if it's just for twenty minutes.

Get out and look around you. Observe. What people look like, what idiosyncrasies they have, what endearing little traits, what annoying little habits? Look closely at the terrain around you. Mentally describe it to yourself. When people tell you something, read the subtext. Read their blinks, their twitches, their eye contact or lack of it. As a trained journalist, I learned to do that early. Train yourself to do it. Soon you'll be doing it automatically, without effort.

Think about your plot while you're driving, while you're jogging, while you're waiting on line at the super-market, while you're watching your laundry go around in the dryer- You'll be amazed at what devious and insidious twists will come to you while you're being drilled at the dentist.

Learn not to waste your thoughts. Don't let them spin randomly while you bake a lasagna. Direct them. Keep them working for you. Make them write for you inside your head. Then they'll flow easily when you're parked in front of your computer screen.

Enjoy it. Get a kick out of it. Laugh out loud while you write. Put the most outrageous stuff that comes into your head on the screen. You can always temper it later. This is called training your imagination to create. Which is what writing fiction is all about.

And remember, writing is largely rewriting. Over and over and over again. Edit, polish, fine tune; and polish again, a hundred times. I have heard myself at book signings, even as I'm standing at the podium reading from my gorgeous, newly published novel, still editing as I read! Yes, actually changing the text, out loud, in front of a roomful of unknowing readers. (I know, I need to see a shrink about that.) My genius editor Sara Ann Freed, the mystery queen of Warner Books, will tell you that she has to rip the manuscript out of my hands on the due date while I fiercely hang onto it, kicking and screaming. Because I know I can always make it better. If they didn't give me deadlines, I'd spend the rest of my life on one book. Or one news story .But you've got to get your piece on the air, and you've got to get your book in the bookstores.

And finally, here's an apt analogy . Writing a book is like having a baby. I know I because I've done both. It takes nine months. The first three months are exhilarating and fun, you're just getting going, you're excited, you're telling everybody about it, and you're brimming with ideas for the little tyke. The second three months you're dragging a bit, you're lonesome because all your friends are out dancing and you can't go, and you're craving strange things to eat while you sit for ten hours straight at the computer to make deadline, so you're putting on weight. Then the last three-month period, "the final trimester" is dreadful. It's hot, and sweaty, and painful, and hard, and you can't imagine what the heck you were thinking when you decided that this was a good idea.

And then the dear thing is born! And it's wonderful. It's adorable. And you go around proudly showing it off to everyone. And you forget all about the pain.

So I'll be proudly showing off my brand new baby at Deadly Ink, called Dead File, starring my sleuth, Maxi Poole. And you'll meet one of my other kids there, The Reporter, Maxi Poole's first romp. And when you see me at Deadly Ink, if I look like I'm showing, it's because I'm having Graveyard Shift. I mean it's because I'm writing Graveyard Shift. That one's due in the summer of next year.

Anyway, are you getting what I'm talking about? Writing is all about mental anguish, pain and agony like you've never known it. Long, lonesome, tired hours, ridiculously hard work and raucous good fun and absolute joy. It is so gratifying. Such rewards! You can go ahead and murder anyone in print, and you won't have to do time. I'm patently aware that prison, for me, is not an option. They don't let you color your hair .So everybody you want to kill (and you have those people in your life, admit it), you can nicely, cleanly, just whack them in print. No blood on your hands. The only blood is on the pages. You don't even get the deadly ink on your hands with your fabulous, millennium computer. Oh, wouldn't old Will have loved that! Can you just imagine how much more Shakespeare would have turned out in his lifetime if he'd had a computer behind the counter in his hat shop?

So what's your excuse? After making the rounds at the fabulous Deadly Ink conference, seeping up the atmosphere, sitting at the feet of your favorite authors, and filling your head with all kinds of cool ideas, go home and plant yourself in front of your computer, or go to the beach with your laptop, (or write longhand on a legal pad like my friend Jackie Collins (with two-hundred-million books in print, she's no slouch!) and start.

Think it up, make it up, have fun with it, write what you know. Murder someone you abhor in print (nicely disguised, please, or the publisher's legal department will be on your neck). Put your alter ego in some fabulous romantic clinches. Dress your characters, design a mansion for them, put them in the sports car you always wanted to drive, and send them off to meet the Queen or dance the mambo at a hot club in TriBeCa. Or murder someone. What a kick!

Just Do It!!

As we say on the news: I'm Kelly Lange, and I'll see you at Deadly Ink.


 

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