Most writers I know grow very attached to their characters. It could almost be said we fall in love with them. This makes us want to make life easier for them. We want them to get the guy, the most excellent job, the fancy chick magnet car. But if we want our stories to be successful we have to become bullies and challenge our characters. Think of all the great books you've read over the years, the wonderful stories you've heard or seen. What did all those have in common? The characters had to struggle to succeed, sometimes even to survive. Think Scarlett O'Hara, Harry Bosch, Frodo Baggins, Odysseus James Bond... all have one thing in common – trouble.

In my own writing I've been guilty of making things easy for my characters. My first drafts are replete with easy conquests, easy answer and only enough trouble to keep them moving along toward my climax. I will have a long term goal (that climax) in mind and be moving everyone along toward that, only to realize part way there that things are going too smoothly for everyone. They and the reader have become complacent. Not good. Complacent readers put books down and don't always pick them back up again. So what do I do – bring something in to the mix that shakes everything up. This can be something as simple as an unexpected phone call to a shot through the window that brings death with it. The phone call can be an old lover trying to make trouble, bad news from the police or the hospital. Anything to shake up that complacency. The shot through the window can be as bad as you want. But remember, nothing will shake up your reader more than killing off someone they weren't expecting to die. The most powerful deaths are of the most sympathetic characters. And it can hurt as an author to kill off these people. But it will impact your readers more than anything else you can ever do. Good conflict equals good story telling.

My writing style is to try to finish the first draft without a lot of self-editing on the fly. If I think of something that would change the plot and require changes early on I will try to note it somewhere and move on. My goal at this point is to get the draft finished. Once that's done the main writing begins. I find it a lot easier to build my story on a frame than in limbo, but at the same time I don't use an outline. Maybe this is a contradiction but I want the story to grow organically and that can't happen for me if I'm tied into an outline. I may know the ending and have one or two key scenes in mind, and I certainly know my characters, but the rest 'grows in the telling' as Tolkien said once about how he wrote The Lord of the Rings.

This is where I will look for ways to up the ante and give my characters more to worry about. If things are going too well I will arrange to have the metaphorical rug pulled out from under them. Sometimes this will result in a change of plot later on, but it's worth it. Especially if I didn't see the surprise coming. With luck it means that neither will the reader. I feel the goal of any mystery is, in part at least, to keep the readers on their toes and not making it simple for them to figure out what's going on.

L.A. Heat has been revised and reissued in e-book format. Find out more at www.pabrown.ca

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