For the first part of this afternoon, I met with Josh Pachter who is an author of crime fiction short stories. He gave me a lot of wonderful advice on inspiration, writing short stories, researching the marketplace and why crime fiction is one of the best genres. First, he told the story of how he’s come up with three of his short story anthologies- crime fiction based on the work of singer-songwriters (Joni Mitchell, Jimmy Buffet and Billy Joel). Mr. Pachter likes to say it’s “brought to you by the letter k”. He has a website that’s self-made with multiple functions including bibliography of all publications in chronological order. A few years ago, he decided to make a second one that listed his works in alphabetical order and when doing this, he noticed that there were 6 letters that none of his works had ever started with. So, he decided to write six stories, each using one letter that had never been used before. The first he chose to start with was K and he immediately thought of Killer Kyle from Joni Mitchell’s The Beat of Black Wings. After writing the story, he realized that he didn’t exactly have a market to sell it to and that he would have to edit his own collection in order to include it. A couple other anthologies based on singer songwriter’s work had been published (Johnny Cash and Bruce Springsteen), so he thought of doing one for Mitchell. He reached out to other authors he knew and all of them said yes to contributing stories into what eventually became The Beat of Black Wings. Second, he explained to me that short stories are more difficult to outline because less happens in them, but that they’re the best way for new authors to start out because there’s more of a marketplace, you can write more in the same amount of time it would take you to write a longer work which lets you hone your craft and it’s a lot easier for someone to get published. For example, he gave me the resource of Ellery Queens Magazine, which is a crime fiction magazine that has an entire department of first stories which specifically features authors that have never been published before and gives them the chance to beat the “catch 22” of only getting published if you’ve had experience. Third, we talked a lot about researching the market place. He recommended using a book called Book Writer’s Market which can be found at the library in order to narrow down which publications are important in a specific genre and then researching all of them and actually reading them to get a sense of what they’re looking for. He compared Book Writer’s Market to Wikipedia in that they’re both a great starting point that will guide you to better sources. Finally, Mr. Pachter endorsed crime fiction because it’s what he writes and has consistently been the best opportunity for someone who wants to be a professional writer to break into serious writing.
