A Master's Class In Creative Writing

May 8, 2008

I received a package from Amazon yesterday--the new John Sandford novel, PHANTOM PREY. I started reading it and was quickly struck by just how good a writer Sandford is. That's not something I always say about writers, no matter how successful they are. They may be good storytellers or they may be good writers or both (or neither, but that's a separate issue). I think Sandford is both. Anyway, I'm going to put up a couple passages from his book that made me sit up and take notice, partly because how much they showed about the character, partly because of how entertaining they were.

You might agree or disagree, but I do think when you come across a writer who not only is very successful, but to whom you respond as a reader, you should pay attention and try to figure out what it is you're responding to and try to adapt it to your own work. So here goes:

Lucas looked down at the laptop, where he'd been wrestling with bureaucratic ratshit. He was late with the annual personnel evaluations, and some time-serving wretch, deep in the bowels of the bureaucracy, whose life work involved collecting evaluation forms, was torturing him with e-mails and phone messages.

And what, really, could he say about Del? Or about Virgil? Or about Jenkins and Shrake?

The questionnaire asked if Del presented himself in a manner that conformed to standards of good practice as outlined in Minnesota state regulations. In fact, the last time Lucas had seen Del, he's been unshaven, hungover, three months late for a haircut, and was wearing torn jeans, worn sneaks, and a sweatshirt that said, *underwear not included.

Virgil, Lucas knew, drove around the state pulling a boat and trailer and almost daily went fishing or hunting on state time, the better to focus investigative vibrations--a technique that seemed to work.

Jenkins and Shrake carried leather-wrapped saps. Jenkins called his the Hillary-Whacker, in case, he said, he should ever encounter the junior senator from New York.

Should all of this go into a file?

*  *  *  

That's when the end-of-winter blues got him. March was a tough month in the Cities. Dress warm, and the day got warm and you sweated. Dress cool, and the day turned cold, and you froze. Cars were rolling lumps of dirt, impossible to keep clean. Everybody was fat and slow, and crabby.

*  *  *

Lucas had jet-black hair salted with streaks of gray, and his face was pale with the winter. He had strong shoulders and a hawk's beak nose, blue eyes, and a couple of notable scars on his face and neck. Traces of the job.

His paternal ancestors, somewhere back through the centuries, had paddled wild fur out of the North Woods, mink and beaver and otter and martin and fisher, across Superior and the lesser Great Lakes, down the St. Lawrence. A bunch of mean Frenchmen; and finally one of them said, "Screw this Canadian bullshit," and moved to the States.

When that happened was not exactly clear, but Lucas's father had suggested that when it did, the immigrant might have had a case of blended whiskey on his shoulder....

His mother's side was Irish and Welsh, and a bit of German; but Lucas wasn't a genealogist and mostly didn't care who'd done what back when.

*  *  *

Well? What do you think? Does it work for you? Is it vivid? Does it entertain and provide insight? What's he doing here that works? Or maybe it doesn't. Thoughts?

Cheers,

Mark Terry`