Dear Readers,
Welcome to "Ten Rules To Write Noir", a new guest post series I will host every Friday. Each week, a contemporary noir writer will lay down his ten rules/advices for the craft. To kick things off in beauty, Anthony Neil Smith, a.k.a Doc Noir, writer of Choke On Your Lies, Psychosomatic and The Drummer (which I am enjoying the shit out of as we speak). If you want more information about him or his books, drop by his blog.
1) Don't write noir. Leave it to the small, sad niche of writers who realize they'll never make money at it, will never get a big audience, and yet still can't seem to stop it from bleeding out of them in every story they write. Just don't do it. Whatever the hell Lee Child is doing, do that instead.
2) If you insist on it, don't go around to writer's conferences asking what noir is. Figure it out, and once someone gives you an answer, accept it rather than asking the same goddamned question at every panel, every signing, every online post. Noir is the only genre where the devoted readers seem to have no idea what it is and must be constantly reminded.
3) Be afraid. If your hero is one of those badasses like Lee Child's Jack Reacher (and remember: those make money but are not noir), who never feels anything except superiority over anyone who tries to cross him, then readers will either be a) bored like me, or b) secretly wishing they were that guy. But when I'm writing a scene where guns and knives and broken bones are in play, shit, I'm terrified. If that was real life? I'd be even more terrified. So write it like that.
4) All the stuff you've ever read in noir novels? Don't do that. We've already seen it. So figure out a way to do the stuff we've seen in such a way as to trick us into thinking we haven't seen it before. But the more fedoras and tough metaphors and slinky femme fatales you have strutting onto the page, the more you're just a copy machine instead of a writer.
5) Be interesting, for fuck's sake.
6) Don't be too smart. The trick is to make the reader forget they're reading. So the more you try to show what a smart writer you are, the more they notice YOU, and that's not good. Especially with noir, which is best served without a thesaurus.
7) Eat a lot of bacon.
8) Can't you do this without dragging a private eye into things? C'mon.
9) Read. A lot. Read read read. Read good stuff, read bad stuff, read Lee Child (which is both), and so on. But if you're not reading much, you're not serious about being a writer anyway, noir or otherwise.
10) It's not a joke. That doesn't mean I shouldn't be laughing.
