Trails By Mark Leichliter

At sixty, I am an aging, which by nature also means a slowing, if dedicated, trail runner. Struggling to breathe while chugging uphill on a singletrack has, for more than twenty years, proven the ideal morning writing break: still time in my head with book-thoughts and character voices but now forced underneath the focused attention required to avoid tripping over a tree root, misjudging the height of a rock step, or slipping sideways off something as innocuous as a fallen pinecone. Trails, like writing, are littered with hazards. Think about the reader too soon and I’m likely to interfere with characters trusting me enough to talk to me. Fail to think about the reader at all and the pacing becomes as slow as an old man’s uphill jog.

 

I am in the early stages of writing a new book, and reading each day’s production is not unlike scanning the details a trail reveals. Some are obvious—the tree downed by the windstorm last week; the need to allow a larger role for a character whose voice arrives full-bodied and full of innuendo; the deer leg deposited on the trail by a mountain lion or coyote; the necessity for more overt tension to appear in the opening pages to fuel curiosity. Others require greater observation—the appearance of huckleberries hiding on the underside of leaves signaling August has arrived; the dialogue response I wrote unconsciously for a character that reveals her insecure vulnerability; the dust-like smoke lingering in the sun’s morning angle indicating the winds have shifted and the fire burning on the other side of the lake will trouble fire crews; the nagging awareness that a reader will want a chapter break sooner than the voyage of discovery has yet enabled. Signs. Like footprints in the dust of a trail.

 

I still write the first draft of novels by hand. I find something useful in seeing the labor—the clutter in the margins, words scratched out, filling the hole in the paragraph—and all that ink. A slower pace allows greater vision. It is akin to that moment on a familiar trail where the sky becomes visible through the trees atop a ridge and its appearance, for a fleeting second, feels like peering within another universe. Writing at a slower pace and rereading within the inky clutter, I experience daily instances when a character will say something and offer a glimpse into a critical element of their personality or a glance into their past.

 

There is something else about a slower pace and heavy effort that links running and writing: At some turn of a switchback—seldom the same one—my thoughts shift from physical labor and from mental clutter, pain falls away, the lungs fill more readily, and a solution to a book problem arrives. People describe the “runner’s high” or “second wind,” and I can testify that the phenomenon is entirely real. For me, however, it offers more than a shift from awareness of labor to internal peace, it also brings clarity to what I am writing. Sometimes the run only reveals an important question. Often, a scene emerges or I hear a passage of dialogue in my head. Frequently I realize how two seemingly disparate parts of a book are related to one another. Once in a while, I see far ahead, like on this morning, when I forget I am running and I realize that the entire story I am telling must be moved backwards by two years, and that the reader must meet a vital character at three distinct moments in time to achieve both the logistics needed and the moment of vulnerability required for the plot to work. The feeling of clarity while running is not unlike moments at the writing desk when a word appears or a metaphor emerges that disclose important connections in the story that had escaped me. Running by letting the body do the work. Thinking by not thinking.

 

When you live among mountains, uphill runs always mean downhill descents where gravity does the work and labor has a payoff—not unlike the return to the writing desk after five miles of therapy when the pen now seems to possess new energy and lines that began to form among pine scent and trail dust lead to the next page, the next scene, the next chapter.

 

I require demanding physical exertion at some point in my writing day or my mental health—and thus my writing—suffers. In the depths of winter, when snow and ice keep me off the trails, I move my workouts into the gym where the camaraderie of friends is welcome and a different kind of distraction, yet while the workouts are hard and still reset my mind, they seldom offer the kinds of writing revelations a mountain trail presents like gifts rising out of the earth.

 

 

Mark Leichliter is the author of the crime novel The Other Side. Writing as Mark Hummel, his titles include the contemporary literary novel In the Chameleon’s Shadow, the short story collection Lost & Found, and a tragic-comedy Man, Underground is forthcoming from Regal House Publishing in October 2023. He is the founding editor of bioStories Magazine (www.biostories.com), a freelance editor, and an active ghostwriter. A native of Wyoming, Mark lives in Montana’s Flathead Valley. You can learn more about his work at www.markleichliter.com.

Warts and All by Mark Leichliter

The crime fiction I write is realistic by nature. Which is to say that my brand of fiction retains all the warts and blemishes of real life. The blood is real, the pain of loss stays with families and is passed on to future generations, some of the people on the right side of justice are also assholes and some of the criminals have redeeming characteristics. That is, after all, how the real world works. Ted Bundy, who killed at least thirty people, once saved a child from drowning and worked for a suicide hotline. Among the vast majority of law enforcement officers who genuinely wish to serve and protect, we will find murderers like Derek Chauvin. These realities are unpleasant. It’s not a wonder that many readers would prefer more sanitized versions of crime or thrillers where the good guys and gals get clean wins. As a teen I was content to use books as escape, thrilled at the pure logic of Sherlock Holmes or left the bounds of earth (and realism) in science fiction, but somewhere along the way I became the annoying guy who whispers during movies, “That would never happen …” Somewhere, I became a stickler for realism.

 

And why is that? What changed?

 

Perhaps realism is inevitable when I reflect on the times actual crime has crossed my life. That’s a messy, mixed bag—from stupid, dangerous teenage visits to drug dealers who lived in salvage yards to slapstick events, like the time would-be robbers ignited a fire while trying to open the safe in my dad’s store with a blow torch, a fire they extinguished with apple cider.

 

But crime also has a habit of opening wounds that don’t scar well and that never align with how we think the world should be. The sense of misalignment I experienced when my close childhood friend committed armed robbery just after high school remains with me. To know someone so well and be left with so many questions is unnerving. But just as unsettling was the recognition that my friend, the son of a federal law enforcement agent, was granted leniency I would never have received from a fraternal justice system.

 

There were any manner of injustices unearthed by my cousin’s murder. Shot dead with a hunting rifle in the street when he was 22, Greg was killed by his friend’s estranged husband. The murderer, who came from a connected, affluent family, was charged with manslaughter. He served six years. My aunt’s near silence in the face of grief lasted far longer, audible in her shaky voice when she did speak. The weight of her mourning remained evident for the rest of her life. She, like too many real crime victims, defied Hemingway’s suggestion that we often become stronger in the broken places, although she might tell us that just getting out of bed each morning after your child has been murdered demonstrates very real strength.

So there is the realism of having known victims and perpetrators and investigators too.

 

Another answer may be because my most recent crime novel focuses on the place I live, so my sense of duty in achieving verisimilitude is close to the bone. The people I write about in Montana’s Flathead valley are also friends and neighbors. The larger social forces at work are real to us, just as real as the decaying presence of meth and the deadly reality of opioids. I’m now at work on a novel that descends deeply into human trafficking, and it seems an unforgivable disservice if I misrepresented the reality of disappearances among indigenous women, including those who have gone missing just a few miles from my home. Reality also reminds us that there are more vulnerable people in indigenous communities for the worst among us to prey upon and fewer resources to protect them. Empathy and respect for those whose lives are touched by crime is a big part of why I think realism has come to matter to me.

 

For the realist writer, the facts matter immensely and typically reveal more than their surface. Ted Bundy may have worked a suicide hotline because his crimes preyed on those who were vulnerable or because he enjoyed the suffering of others. Three other officers on scene failed to demand that Derek Chauvin remove his knee from George Floyd’s neck. My friend dropped his driver’s license at the drive-up window of the liquor store he robbed. Violent crime in Laramie, WY, where my cousin was murdered was sparse in the decades before his death; 18 years later, with the murder of Matthew Shepard, Laramie is synonymous with murder. Stranger than fiction? Perhaps. The task of realism in literature is to create a shadow of the actual world, if one that is sharper and darker. For my part, while I greatly respect the diversity of all mystery sub-genres, including those that allow escape where amateur sleuths solve crimes where readers never see the body, the warts remain visible. There are no “right” ways to write crime fiction. Perhaps we writers exert control over the criminal world because forces larger than ourselves have shaped us in ways beyond our grasp.

 

Mark Leichliter is the author of The Other Side. He lives in Montana. To learn more about his work, visit him at www.markleichliter.com.