The Work

 I've been missing in action lately. Too much going on in my personal life (nothing horrible, thank goodness, just a lot of stuff). I've been reading my blogmates' previous posts, and oh, they are so on the money – about why we like horror stories, and how unfortunately the real world is a horror story right now.  I can hardly watch the news or read a newspaper any more. The only thing I can try to make sense of these days are my own writings about human nature.

Last week I got hold of a fabulous book on the act of creating, written by one of my favorite historical novelists, Steven Pressfield. It's entitled Do The Work : Overcome Resistance and Get Out of Your Own Way. It's a little tiny thing, less than 100 pages, but like all of Pressfield's writing, it is pithy as hell and right to the point. The blurb for the book says that it is "an action guide that gets down and dirty in the trenches." One of the first things he suggests a writer (or any artist/creator) must do before he begins is determine what the work is about. After I read that sentence, I had to put the book down and ponder for a minute.

You see, I'm right in the middle of the first draft of a novel, and the best I can say is that it's about...150 pages long. I have a fabulous set up, great characters, some fantastic scenes. It's a cold case murder, but besides trying to find out who did it, our heroine is trying to prove the main suspect did not do it. As usual, I'm having a little trouble figuring out how my protagonist is going to figure it out in a believable way. 

A few weeks ago, there was a thread on one of the mystery writers' discussion groups concerning victims. Why, one author asked, are most victims in mysteries horrible people? Why then would anyone care if the killer was caught? Interesting question. It made me think back over my twelve mysteries and consider who I have killed, and why anyone cared. Thus far, my victims have been: 1) an old buzzard who had it coming, 2) a sad case, 3) a member of the family, 4) another member of the family, 5) a couple of haunted young men, 6) a guitarist in a mariachi band, 7) a really, really bad guy. 8) another really bad guy, 9) a bunch of innocent people, 10) a sex-trafficker, 11) Rudolph Valentino

Of the slate of victims, only three were terrible people whose deaths left the world a better place. None of the rest deserved their fates. So the point in most of my mysteries is to find justice for those who met a tragic end. However, why would a reader care who killed the bad guys? Does it have to do with the simple intellectual challenge of solving the puzzle? Does it have to do with making sure an innocent person isn't implicated? In one of my favorite books, Hell With the Lid Blown Off, the victim is awful but all the suspects are perfectly lovely people. No matter who gets fingered, it's going to be sad. Or is it? In this new manuscript, I have a similar moral dilemma.

I love those.