Posts Tagged: The Shop

Do you see what I see?

J. Carson Black @ www.jcarsonblack.com

Books do one thing that television and movies can’t do:

They give you your own personal experience. Reading calls upon you to see what YOU see, and while it might be similar to the author’s intention, what you see comes from where you live, who your family is, how you see the world, the experiences you’ve had. If you lived in Greenland, you would experience a different world than a person who lives, say, in Tucson, Arizona.

I’ve never been to Greenland, so if someone describes it, I still see it my way: a vast platform of ice, populated by polar bears. Or maybe it’s taken from a TV show I saw as a child—Eskimos fishing. It comes from everything I’ve learned up to this point.

Childhood, school, the area where I live, what the people are like in my neighborhood, if I live way out on a ranch somewhere or cheek-to-jowl in a crowded city. People have mutual experiences, like school, learning to drive a car, your job. Your car might be an expensive beauty, and mine might be falling apart.

So we see everything through the prism of our own minds and experiences—and books give us the freedom to do just that.
Do you see what I see graphic
MY view of a cabin in the woods, depending on the area you or I live in, would look different from YOUR cabin in the woods. My picture of a strong female cop might be different from your idea of a strong female cop. She could be massive and strong. She could look like the cop on Criminal Minds. She could be red-haired, freckled, model-thin, with a whip-smart mind and a smart mouth to go with it. Whoever she is, she’s YOUR person. You made up your half of her.

If my character is driving on a lonesome winding highway in the middle of the night, YOU’RE driving on a road that might be like it, but it’s all your own—it’s your road. You fill in the pieces of the puzzle. That, in a nutshell, is the wonder of reading.

And because you hold the other piece of the jigsaw puzzle, I respect you and I respect what you add to the story. It takes two to tango. And I can’t help but wonder: what do YOU see?

Show me how you see it

Here are five subjects that have appeared in my books. I’m going to furnish you with a short description of each scene, and it’s up to you to fill in the blank. What does it LOOK LIKE?

Please post those pictures here on my Pinterest Page. Choose as many as you’d like. I’m really curious how you see these places and people.

1. A cabin in the woods near Aspen, Colorado—the opening scene of my thriller, The Shop.

2. A guy out in the boonies with a camper and a dog on a chain—from The Survivors Club.

3. A bombed-out house in Iraq with a secret stash of incredible riches—from Hard Return.

4. A bandshell in a western town—from Darkness on the Edge of Town.

5. A horsewoman teaching a riding class—from The Survivors Club.

I wonder how different your photos will be from other peoples’ photos, or what I saw as I wrote these scenes. I really want to know what YOU see. Go to https://www.pinterest.com/carson9648/

Categories: Books Darkness on the Edge of Town Hard Return The Shop The Survivors Club

About The Shop: The Story Behind the Story

J. Carson Black @ www.jcarsonblack.com

When a murder happens, the ramifications of that act affect everyone in its immediate circle. It spreads out like concentric circles in a pond, touching people who never even knew the victim. You see it every day on television. The little boy kidnapped on a walk home from school. The wife and mother who inexplicably disappears. The beautiful model killed, left in a dumpster and burned beyond recognition.

Murder changes everything. It is an assault to the system.

And sometimes, there is murder that seems to have no motive. But we know there’s always some kind of motive, if we look hard enough.

There are some in this world who cast a cold, hard eye on the innocent, and use them for their own aims.

Think about JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command, which flourished under Vice President Dick Cheney, where CIA operatives, in conjunction with Blackwater LLC, trained assassins to kill al-Qaida operatives–the ultimate outsourcing. Who cares about al-Qaida? I don’t know about you, but I’d like to see them all dead. So why should that give us pause?

Maybe because once you start down that road, it’s hard to get back off. Maybe, if you can take care of certain problems, cleanly and efficiently, you begin to extrapolate the desired results to other situations, and before you know it—

The Shop by J. Carson Black

There’s a domestic version of JSOC.

My political crime thriller, The Shop–about a group of young people killed in a house in Aspen–is, I hope, a rollicking good story. But it serves another purpose. I see it as the canary in the coal mine.

There are people who will do you harm at the drop of a hat. They don’t even need the hat. And there are unseen forces behind governments that seek only greater riches, greater power, and to consolidate what power they have so it will never be threatened. So much of what is happening in the world today is the result of the Unseen. The oil pipeline nobody hears about on the news. A secret pact between two countries–and suddenly hundreds are dead. The undermining of a legitimate government. Backroom deals with Wall Street firms. And money–billions of it—lubricating it all like a fine machine.

There’s the increasing feeling in this country, that no matter what he does, the Average Joe is getting nowhere. Because, he feels, the game is fixed.

Brienne Cross and the young people with her in the house in Aspen had no idea what was coming for them, and they would never have guessed why they were slated to die. They were as lambs to the slaughter.

While their story as told in The Shop is fictional, it reflects larger truths.

For my part, I felt compelled to return to the story after I wrote it, and explore their lives–the lives of the victims. So now I give you the Story behind the Story.

— J. Carson Black

Categories: Cyril Landry The Shop

Learn from bestselling thriller authors

J. Carson Black @ www.jcarsonblack.com

Back in Michelangelo’s day, artists were apprenticed to the masters. They spent years copying the paintings of the great artists.

By doing so, they learned. They learned where to put which kind of detail, they learned color, brushstrokes, composition, perspective. They absorbed it all by doing—until it came naturally. They developed a sure hand.

The best teachers are the finest writers in your genre—the ones who resonate with you. In my case, they are bestselling thriller authors. You can learn from them for the price of a hardcover or even a paperback book. The only other thing you need is a pen.
LA requiem book notes
I would buy the hardcover books of the great authors in my genre—the four or five I could relate to, and then I would dissect their books, looking for the signposts of their craft, and marking up the pages of their print editions. I didn’t want to sound like any one of them, I just wanted to learn what they did and how they did it. What I learned was the rhythm of the type of book I most wanted to write.

A book covers a lot of ground. There’s a beginning, a middle, and an end, with many other points in between. You read and study enough great writers in your genre, and you start to catch on to that rhythm: what goes where, when. You absorb it so that it comes naturally. And you learn to give little gifts to your reader along the way.

My teachers have been numerous. Michael Connelly, Jeffery Deaver, Robert Crais, James W. Hall, T. Jefferson Parker, Stephen King, John Lescroart, and C.J. Box. All different from one another, but great teachers, and all bestselling thriller authors.
The Shop by J. Carson Black
My advice to you: buy the books written by the masters in your genre. Get out your pen, write in the margins (sorry, Mom!), and figure out what they’re doing and why. When I was preparing to write The Shop, I knew I really had to step up my game, and I leaned on these masters to glean what I could to hone my craft.

Teach yourself. Learn from the very best, and who knows? You could join the ranks of bestselling thriller authors.

It only costs the price of a book and a pen.

Categories: Writing

Airport Fiction

J. Carson Black @ www.jcarsonblack.com

When I started my first big thriller, THE SHOP, I wanted it to be (to quote Donald Trump): HUGE. Glenn and I tossed around words, and the best word that came to mind was “Airport Fiction.” A book that grabs you and doesn’t let go.The Shop by J. Carson Black

I’d had two eye-opening experiences with those kinds of books. On a trip to Florida to see our relatives, I picked out Jeffery Deaver’s THE BLUE NOWHERE in paperback. I wanted a shiny new book to take across country.

Turned out, I literally couldn’t put it down. I read that darn thing everywhere. In line with luggage, in line for the flight, at the bar where I nibbled on my sandwich, on the flight. I barely looked up to meet with my brother-in-law and his family, as we sat at an airport bar and I just read and read and read.

Frankly, I was rude. I feel bad about it now, but it was kind of like a fever. I couldn’t stop myself. There I was, meeting my father-in-law’s wife for the first time, and before you knew it I was sitting on a chair reading THE BLUE NOWHERE while everyone around me talked.

Warning: THE BLUE NOWHERE can lead to rudeness!

Fast-forward to another airport. This time I was flying to New Zealand. There was the Incredible Spinning Rack, and a beautiful blue and red paperback caught my eye. Florida! Boats! Murder! I read the first page of MEAN HIGH TIDE by James W. Hall, and was hooked like a hapless grouper. Airport Fiction.Mean High Tide cover

This book changed the way I wanted to write fiction. It made me want to write crime fiction. It made me want to put hard characters on stage, bigger-than-life characters. It made me want to get visceral. MEAN HIGH TIDE opened up a whole new world. It led to Robert Crais and Michael Connelly, and so many great crime fiction authors. I’d written a romantic suspense—my agent thought it would sell well. Now I can fully admit I wasn’t very good at it.

Write what you LOVE. That’s the way to fly high with Airport Fiction.

Everything changed. I knew the kinds of books I wanted to write. Whether I’ve been successful or not in writing books in that vein is not for me to say.

All I can say is that those books gave me the passion to write what I love.

Categories: Books Cyril Landry


Subscribe for updates and get a free ebook!
Subscribe to the newsletter and get a Free copy of The Bluelight Special. A Cyril Landry short story.