Novelist and district attorney Mark Pryor said writers should go the location they intend to write about. He spoke to the Nov. 11, 2018, meeting of the Heart of Texas Sisters in Crime chapter in Austin. Pryor is a district attorney in the Travis County District Attorney's office and started his career as a journalist. He said he likes to tell stories and he gets to do that as a DA.
He is best known for his mystery novels featuring Hugo Marston, a former FBI agent from Texas, and now head of security at the U.S. Embassy in Paris. His most recent book, The Book Artist, tells the story of an artist who makes sculptures out of books by cutting them up. And of course, there is murder and an assassin.
Pryor answered questions from the audience rather than give a prepared presentation.
It's always a good idea to go to the location you're writing about and get a real good feel for the place.
Despite all your work on research, there is always going to be inconsistencies. So don't stress about every factoid. You are going to get something wrong. But try to get your material right anyway.
Real life criminals are not that smart. But in your book, if your criminal is dumb, your book is not going to be very interesting. So you're going to have to have smarter criminals than normal.
I use the names of my friends as my characters in my books. I get them to sign a release of course. When I use the name of a friend, I use a similar description as to how they look and act. But that character becomes (grows into) their own person as the book progresses.
There are so many characters in my book that it's hard to keep track of all of them.
As a prosecutor he gets to tell a story to the jury. He can see the power of a good engaging story when he tells his case during the trail. Defense attorneys, on the other hand, mainly poke holes in the prosecutor's story.
As a prosecutor, I am a convinced the subject is guilty when I take the case to court.
A lot of times the defendant's lawyer doesn't like the deal we offer his client, so the case goes to trial.
When law enforcement has someone in witness protection, it's because someone wants to kill him. The feds don't want him on the stand at the trail. The defense attorney will ask him his name (his real name) or why did you move to your present address. The feds don't want that to get out into the public.
From his journalism experience, when he writes a story, his first pass at writing the piece is close to first draft quality.
As an author, when you have a new book coming out, you've got to do the book tour.
Authors need a Facebook presence, a Twitter presence, a mailing list, and a website.
Don't retweet every good review you get on Good Reads. Let them interact without your comments.
Readers like to see an inside look into the author's life.
If you tweet or Facebook something political, that might get you some new followers, but you are just as likely to lose followers by being political. So I don't recommend getting political on social media.
A blog is nice to have but you need a real hook to keep people interested. Blogs are no longer a primary social media method to get new readers.
When I blog, it is less about myself but more about things I'm interested in. But the blog ship has sailed.
I always get people who ask if my book is on audio. There's a demand for that.
When he writes a mystery novel, he has flexibility. That includes not knowing who did it when he starts a novel. Sometimes as he writes, he learns who did it. He determines as he goes along who could have done it and conversely why he could not have done it.
The one thing you've got to get right is guns. And cell phones.
I let the story tell itself.
I believe if you write a good book, it will get published.
It is hard to rewrite something that's bad into something that's good. The better course of action is to start to write something new.
It's important to finish your book. Once finished, put it away for a week. Start thinking about your next book. Then over one weekend, I'll read that book and I'll make the corrections over that weekend.
Normally I'll have two or three people read the book when I finish the draft. I don't want them to line edit. I want them to look for plot holes.
My editor will go through it for the line edits. My copy editor goes through it two or three times.
With those edits incorporated, I'll have another reader go through it.
The editor shows me two or three covers. I'll pick one. The editor ends up choosing the cover he/she wants anyway.
Recognize your limitations. Your editor and the publishing staff want to sell as many copies of your book as possible. They have your best interests at heart.
I develop my main character as I write a book series. My goal is to find out something new about my main character with each book.
Be careful describing with the main character too much after he/she has already been introduced. Too much description of him/her later in the book will spoil what the reader already pictures him/her as.
Non-fiction is very different from fiction. In non-fiction, you have to get it right. But you also don't have to dream anything up like you do in fiction.
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