Out in the Open

Note - This is a small part of another chapter of my whodunit mystery novel Out in the Open - A Rudransh Ray mystery. Hope you will like it.


Stench of death touched Lisa Brown. She halted by the window and stared out. For a moment she could see nothing. Or could she? Something moved in the garden. Or, was it someone? She leaned forward to take a better look. Her naked eyes could detect nothing. Everything appeared to be perfectly normal. She felt like a fool for being afraid. Yet, deep inside her heart, the fear remained. To be sure, she took another look at the garden.

Why the surrounding suddenly felt so frightening? She wondered. Thick cloud passed over and the moon vanished behind the curtain. In the utter gloom the garden looked like a graveyard. Or so she thought. The tall and thin trees loomed like lanky monsters. Heat rose and she felt the satin night gown clinging against her skin.

With a shrug she pushed the gown off her shoulders. Cool breeze touched her skin and a shiver passed through her body. She was cold all of a sudden.

True the night was chilly. True the wind cut through the flesh. But, inside the mansion it was warm enough to be comfortable, sometimes hot even. Then why? She wondered again. Her hands lovingly touched her breasts. She rubbed her open palms over the supple globes. Beneath the skin of her hands the nipples erected. She shivered, this time not from cold. She tilted her head and closed her eyes. 

Show Don’t Tell – Well Sometime You Should

Before reading this post, please note that I don’t consider myself a master of the craft. I don’t even consider that I know more than anyone else in this profession. I am not in any way contradicting anyone. This is just an expression of my personal understanding. I am learning and this blog is created to share the experience of the process.

This is yet another advice I have come across so many times – show don’t tell, make your readers feel, take them to the scene, etc, etc. A while back I was reading an interview of Lee Child. According to this bestselling thriller writer – we are telling stories, not showing it. I agree. We are storytellers. We tell tales in our own ways.

Of course, I am not advising anyone to say – Tina was angry and leave it there. When you do that you say nothing about the character. You just mention that a female character is angry. But, who is Tina? How old is she? What is her background? How angry is she? These are the questions that you are not answering. But that doesn’t really mean you should show the readers the exact shade of Tine’s hair color or the length of her skirt (although that might appeal to the male readers).

The point is you are a novelist. You are writing fiction. You are not a movie maker. Leave showing part to James Cameron. As a writer your job is to tell a story.

I have a habit of reading about writing. When I am tired of my own writing or don’t feel like reading another writer’s work, I read about the craft with the hope that I will be able to improve a bit. I have seen that teachers and writers have different opinion about this. Some are ardent supporters of showing and some want to break the rules and create one of their own. What should you do? As a beginner, even as a pro, it might be difficult to decide which approach is better suited for your story.

So, many times, I have stopped my pen (yes, I write my first draft with pen and paper) and pondered how to show this scene. I have tried to show everything in a story. But in the end it sounded like a manual. It took me a long time to realize writing is a fusion of both showing and telling. Too much of either one can make your story a dull read. So, what should you do?

I rather explain what I do as you should choose your own style and manner of writing. I try to understand the genre I am working on. Since I am a mystery writer, my job is easy. I deal with the human minds. So, I can get away with telling sometimes. How else do you portray someone’s thought? Rudransh Ray spends a good deal of time thinking and I need to tell the readers what he is thinking about. Here I have little chance of showing the thoughts.

But when it comes to action scenes, I do show the smell of air and the long stretched shadows. These are good ingredients of mystery writing.

Even if your genre is not mystery, you will have plenty of chances to tell your story. Readers want to know about the characters and to introduce your characters you need to tell them about the mind frame, the thought process. How a character feels is important (and I guess it is the most important part of a story). Therefore, don’t be afraid of telling your story. Rules are there. But you have the liberty of breaking those rules and do what feels right for your story. You are a writer. You are a creator. Don’t restrict yourself or your creativity. Dare to be different.  

Write What You Know or Should You...

I began writing with utter reluctance. I knew that I was stepping into another territory. Although the turf is fascinating, even soul enriching, it frightened me. So, like every amateur, I sought help. I browsed Internet and read blogs of other writers (and I never stopped). I dug into books on writing. Surprisingly, every website or how to book I checked had one common advice – write what you know.

I did, I wrote what I knew and eventually I realized – I was producing trash. This got me thinking should you really write what you know? True John Grisham writes legal thrillers because he knows law. But, did J.K Rowling practice black magic? Did Raymond Chandler murdered people? Did John Sandford hack computers? No, none of them experienced what they wrote about. Even John Grisham did not work for the mafias.

So, what do we get here? Writing what you know will make the realm of fiction boring. This is fiction and you are crafting a story. You are imagining incidents that did not happen in the reality. You are illustrating characters that never existed. You are not writing what you know. You are creating.

Ann Rule writes what she knows. Of course, she does. She is a true crime story writer. But, are you? Really? If you want to write what you know, you should get into writing non-fiction. Fiction writing is exploring turfs unknown. You begin from a blank page and slowly create a world that will cease to exist without your effort. As a writer, I don’t think you should write what you know. Why restrict your creativity? Rather try to know what you want to write about.

Yes, this is the only way of writing truly compelling stories. If you want to write fantasy, research about magic. Learn how people cast spells. And you never know what you may create. Have the courage to step out of the comfort zone. Learn about the world unfamiliar to you. Enrich yourself and explore. Without the desire to know more, you cannot grow as a writer.

Since the childhood I have devoured mystery novels. Even in my adulthood I mostly read mysteries. Yet, when I picked up my pen, I feared creating a mystery story. I thought what do I know about crimes and criminals. I knew nothing about criminology either. So, I wrote what I knew. From my educational background I knew history and I wrote a historical novel. It sucked. While writing the story I knew my heart wasn’t in it. I could not visualize the world I created. But, I wrote what I knew and I was trying to be happy.

Reality hit me when the rejection letters began coming my way. I sat bemused, not being able to decode the mystery of being rejected. I was writing what I knew, then what went wrong? It took a while to realize that I was cheating myself. Historic fiction is not my genre.

That day, I changed my genre and created Rudransh Ray a criminologist who fights crime and Out in the Open just happened. When I started writing this novel, I did not even know that I will be able to finish it, that I will be able to write The End of this story. I stumbled too many times, threw away too many pages, read too many books and eventually I did finish my first mystery novel. The journey was a glorious one. What happens to this book is not the primary factor, at least not to me. I have succeeded writing a genre I know nothing about and that is the point here.

Next time you want to write that thriller, do write it. If you know about the topic, good, if you don’t know anything about it, even the better. You will have the opportunity to study and learn. So, go for it and enjoy the journey.