s.m.harding crime fiction

At the other end of the continuum is the cozy, what I'm calling the "softboiled" novel. Characteristics of cozies are that sex and violence takes place off-stage [no blood, folks, except what's viewed from a distance after the fact]; features an amateur sleuth [no cops, except as secondary characters]; normally is set in a small town, sometimes a manor house [often one that's cut off from help]; and often the series will last for years.

The genesis of the hardboiled crime novel can be traced to the United States. Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammet, James Cain, Ross McDonald, and Mickey Spillane are all acknowledged authors of the harboiled detective novel. Arising from earlier pulp publications, the protagonist was most often a tough and cynical PI who is a loner, violence was played out on the page, and the action occurred in large cities. The word most often applied to hardboiled crim...

Notice I didn't say "teaching," though that's what it's called. Along my writing path, I've had some wonderful teachers and one of the things I've noticed is that they share what they've learned, both in presentation and critique. No hard rules, just the lessons learned from their own perspective.

I want to thank the students who came to The Writers' Center on an absolutely beautiful Sunday -- they were fun and asked good questions. I hop...

On the home page I mentioned the cozy/hardboiled continuum, but it strikes me that not many people think of it as a gradual shift from one kind of writing to another. "Oh, I don't read hardboiled novels," says one person. As if that covers it, closes the subject. Yet I wonder if she reads Sara Paretsky. V.I. is the epitome of a hardnosed PI. Not as much of a lone-wolf as the classic PIs, not as concerned with a personal code of conduct as much as a social conscience....

I'd like to talk about fiction in the following months (I'm not promising days), writing it, reading it, trends in publishing, and marketing ideas I see on other blogs.

For this time just let me say that if you want to write, do it! Don't talk about, don't read about how to do it, just put one word at a time down. Into sentences, into paragraphs, into stories. Begin with an image and describe what you se...