On the move

This spring has been –– and will be for the considerable future –– a blur. A lifelong New Englander, I, along with my adventurous wife, have sold our home and are moving to Michigan, where I’ve taken a job as the Upper School Director of Detroit Country Day School in suburban Detroit.

This leaves me with a foot in two different worlds at the moment –– working for the school I’m at and doing things for the one I’m going to (my official start date is July 1).

In regards to my “other job,” writing, it also leaves me with a host of questions: I just finished a manuscript set at a New England boarding school, which I hope will launch a new series. It’s off to my agent, and I’m awaiting word from her, as I start the sequel. Will she like it? Will she sell it? And, more importantly, after nearly two decades living and working at boarding schools, what will it be like to write about them once I’m removed from that world?

My proximity to the setting has led me to believe I created an authentic world and view into it, and I’ve thought about Hemingway’s ability to write about Michigan once he went to Paris. (Maybe I’m doing his reverse commute.) Perhaps the step to a day school will free me to write even more truthfully about the boarding school world.

"The writer's job is to tell the truth," Hemingway wrote in A Moveable Feast. "I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.' So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say."

This is still my favorite Hemingway quote, and I’m hoping (as I’m sure many of you do, too) that it sees me through.

Processing Process

I really enjoyed Tom’s post this week. The writing process interests me a great deal, and processing the process always leads me to more questions than answers.

I’m about three-fourths through my work-in-progress, and for the first time ever life has gotten in the way and significantly slowed my progress. I’m usually pretty good about compartmentalizing, but this fall, that’s not been the case.

It’s been a time of starts and stops, and, for me, that’s a killer. I need to write every day, to follow the thread consistently. I have tried to outline in the past –– and learned I don’t do it well. Or, rather, I don’t do it efficiently. (I can create an outline, but I never seem to follow it.) So, instead, I spend lots of time sketching characters –– who they are, what makes them do what they do –– enough to know how they’ll react in particular situations.

This fall, when traction has been hard to come by, writing to the end of the headlights has been more difficult than ever. I’ve had to go back and re-read the entire manuscript (53,000 words and counting) to know where to point the car. I’m at that stage again, having rediscovered my lane and pushing the pedal once more.

I’m a note-taker. I carry a notebook at all times. It’s a chance to outline as I go, to scribble questions my protagonist should be asking as he clutches the puzzle pieces, to sketch out possible endings. Notebooks get filled with ideas for titles, names, plots, lines of dialogue.

In the end, when I talk about the writing process, I have fewer insights than questions. As Hemingway said, “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” I agree wholeheartedly. In fact, it’s why I keep at it, pointing the car into the dark and seeing where it leads.

What You Don't Know

Sorry to be so very late today. Classes begin on Monday, and this morning we had orientation for incoming grad students -- virtual orientation with each faculty member taking 3 or 4 minutes to introduce ourselves to the students who hadn't met up during PhD student weekend. 

I was thinking about my first classes of the semester on Monday and Tuesday and the work I still need to do on my online courses when I remembered today is my day to post. 

 I was up really late last night and up early this morning. The first thing I thought this morning was the short story that I have due (for an anthology) at the end of the month. The theme is the midnight hour. I had nothing -- no ideas. Then while Googling for images from 1939 (as I thought about a scene in my historical thriller), I came across one of Edward Hopper's 1942 painting. On of my favorite paintings by him, called "Nighthawks," The nighthawks are three people and a counterman in a diner. This painting always makes me think of Ernest Hemingway's short story, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," and of the movie based on his short story, "The Killers." 

I saw the painting, and I knew my short story would be set in a diner. I couldn't decide who my sleuths would be -- whether it would be a Lizzie Stuart mystery featuring my crime historian and her fiance, John Quinn, a former homicide detective. Or maybe a Hannah McCabe story, with my Albany homicide detective and her police partner, Mike Baxter. 

Because of a series of unexpected events -- including conversations I had with two baseball fans -- I'm now writing a Lizzie Stuart story. I have already established that Quinn is a baseball fan. And it seems that the year of the story -- the series, including my 6th book in progress, is now up to 2004. As I was informed that was a landmark year in baseball. That Red Sox curse that I then remembered. It makes sense that Quinn would stop to watch the game that he has been listening to on the radio. It's late, and he needs  a cup of coffee and something to eat after driving back to Gallagher from the airport. 

I discovered a few minutes in one of the games -- I happened on it in a video -- when play stops because one of the players is hit with a ball. That is the perfect moment for my killer to strike -- while everyone is looking at the television screen. And Lizzie, who Quinn calls from the diner decides she really wants a hamburger and fries and will sleep a lot better if she gets out of the house after spending  the day trying to finish a paper that is due. She gets to the diner just before or just after the murder.  . . 

I think it will work. But I know next to nothing about baseball. I have never been to a baseball game. I have never even seen an entire game on television. I do know a bit about the history of the game -- the 1919 Black Sox scandal, the Negro baseball league, Babe Ruth, baseball movies and documentaries. But Quinn is a fan because my friend -- with whom I talk through my plots-- convinced me that baseball is a thinking person's sport. A sport that Quinn would appreciate.

Thankfully -- one of life's blessing if you're a writer-- people who know about a topic are always willing to share their knowledge -- love sharing their knowledge. My thanks to my two guides through the 2004 baseball season.

Knowing yourself

Rick’s post and Thomas’s post each got me thinking about the nitty-gritty, the hows and whys, of writing.

Hemingway said somewhere that one doesn’t become a better writer, only a better editor. Like most of what Hemingway said on the topic, I agree. For me, improvement has always been tied to knowing myself –– knowing my strengths and weaknesses and using that knowledge and self-awareness to evolve.

Character and dialogue are things I do best. Those aspects of writing fiction have always come easily. Plot, not so much. Plot I have to work at. I write in a Google document, and the margins are filled with notes and comments –– reminders about who knows what, who said what, who did what, and what needs to happen in the course of the story or book. Keeping track of the threads of the spider web has never been as easy.

And, as Rick mentioned, over-writing is always an issue. I think this is a common problem most of us battle. How much is too much? Is the line of dialogue clear? Do I need one more brushstroke here? I talk about this with my students often, telling them, Overwriting happens when you’re not confident in what you’ve conveyed. And I am quick to admit (to them and to you) that I’m as guilty as anyone.

All of which points us to the importance of revision and, as Hemingway would say, always working to become your own best editor.

*

As an aside, summer is off to a nice start. My reading list consists of Angie Thomas’s On the Come Up, William Kent Krueger’s A Tender Place, and I need to reread Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried to teach it in the fall. My oldest, Delaney, graduated from college (we held our own ceremony), and is moving to New York City to start her first job. She recruited a cheap painter...

Turning 50

I turned 50 this week. My wife is planning a big birthday party, which I am trying like hell to squash. It isn’t that I don’t appreciate her efforts, but I just don’t see the point. My 50th birthday felt just like all the others. The day was the same as other days. I got up at 5 a.m., went to the gym, and tried like hell to write a scene that day. Same as any other day.

What turning 50 has changed, maybe, is that I’m thinking about aging well a little more this week. Heart disease (and other bad things) run in my family. (My 18-year-old freshman, Audrey, a distance runner at Denison University, called and said she had to take a physical for the Denison Athletic Department. “I had to check every box on the sheet,” she said. “Heart disease, diabetes, cancer…” “Sorry, kid,” I said.)

I’m trying to make better choices regarding my health, but that didn’t start this week; it began last summer when I went gluten-free. Haven’t lost weight, but I feel better. And I’m exercising. Years of hockey left me with an arthritic back. Running hurts my back, and my body breaks down. It’s an admission that's been a long time coming because I enjoy the solitude of running. I’ve found that weight lifting, though, makes everything feel better, tighter. So I try to get in the weight room every day. I see many benefits to doing this. My back feels a hell of a lot better, and when that happens my golf game is much improved.

But I’m not lifting weights to play golf. I’m doing it to write.

When I’m up early and exercising, my writing is better. I’m more focused. I get more done in less time, which means a lot to me because I don’t have a lot of spare time.

Haruki Murakami, in his book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, writes about his relationship with “serious” running, which he defines as six miles every day. I know that very often distance runners (cross country and track) have the highest GPAs on college campuses, and I imagine endorphins have a lot to do with that.

My goal at age 50 is only to set myself up to be writing at 60, 70, and 80. I think about Hemingway’s decline in his 50s and how it all ended at 61. My own father passed at 63, far too young.

So, yes, there might be a party I’m not supposed to know about. And, yes, there will probably be lots of gag gifts, and I’ll laugh, and we will no doubt all have a good time. But the truth is I’m treating 50 like any other day. Because the goal of 50 is to make sure I’m still writing at 60.

Travel and writing, not travel writing

I have the good fortune this week to be writing this post from Morgan Hill, California. I arrived Saturday afternoon, got my rental car at the San Francisco International Airport, and drove an hour south to Morgan Hill, taking in the scenery (and the traffic) all the way.

One of the interesting things about stepping into a new location is that your perception of your surroundings becomes heightened.

I called my wife from the car, passing San Jose, and said the area felt a little like El Paso, Texas, where we lived for three years. When I arrived in Morgan Hill and spent time driving around the town, I told her it felt like a combination of Bend, Oregon (big-money, outdoorsy), and El Paso (mountain ranges, farm land). Being in a new place forces me to observe, and being forced to do that makes me think about how and where I incorporate setting details into my writing.

I love atmospheric books. James Lee Burke’s rich portrayal of New Orleans. Robert B. Parker’s depiction of Boston. Alexander McCall Smith’s use of Mma Precious Ramotswe to offer insights into Botswana. Even settings that can’t be described but are present, like Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, the physical structure of which I can’t explicitly describe but I feel the weight of the lighthouse on the characters on every page of the novel, nonetheless. (I’m still not sure how she does that.)

The settings in these books offer a layer of richness and nuance that readers might not even notice as they follow the plot and grow attached to the characters. And writing setting details is never easy. Hemingway said, Writing is always architecture, never interior design.

Likewise, the “clever” metaphor is only clever if it helps the reader by saving her time. Symbol, unless you are Steinbeck, is a critic’s word, not a writer’s.

So the use of setting to enhance a work can be a tightrope walk. I find myself often adding and just as often cutting in the same scene. A brushstroke here. A cover-up there. How much is too much? Am I writing that because I like it or because it will add something to the scene? (Be honest, John!) All are questions I struggle with as I go.

I’d love to hear what others think about setting and the place those details play in one’s work.

Plot Points

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the benefits of outlining a novel before you begin writing. I’m still plugging away at it, and, having moved scenes and added and eliminated characters, I’m more committed to outlining than before.

To outline or not to outline? According to The Writing Cooperative website, Joyce Carol Oates claims, “The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence is written.” And Ernest Hemingway said, “Prose is architecture. It’s not interior design.”

It’s hard to argue with either of these two writers, and one of the major takeaways I have from this experience is that outlining allows me to see the story arc from thirty thousand feet. As the story takes shape, I can view the beginning, middle, and end and make decisions. For instance, I have made major plot revisions –– adding a backstory to clarify a major character’s motivation and cutting another character out completely –– before I begin writing.

In the past, I have written novels the way one drives at night –– writing “to the end of my headlights.” That is, writing each scene based on the scene that preceded it, and making plot decisions based on the previous scene and my instincts, guided by what I know about the character. This is an exciting way to write. The adage “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader” can be fitting. I wrote This One Day (as K.A. Delaney) that way. I didn’t know how the book would end until I was thirty pages from the conclusion. And it was terrifying.

More recently, I pulled a hundred pages from the draft of a novel and eliminated an entire secondary plotline. Both revisions cost me months –– months that, given my day job (I’m a boarding school teacher, dorm head, department chair, and coach), amounts to large chunks of time that I simply don’t have to waste.

But opinions vary, and Stephen King says, “Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters’ theses.”

I’d love to hear what my Type M friends say on the matter.

Writing the end: How much detail do you really want?

Writing a novel is never easy, no matter how many times you’ve done it. We hear so often the first 50 pages must establish conflicts and grab the reader by the throat; the middle develops characters and the plot; and the ending must not be predictable but also provide a satisfying solution.

When I work on the ending of a book, I’m usually thinking about pacing and twists. What must logically take place? Where can I offer an unexpected event that also makes sense?

With this in mind, setting details often take a hit. My agent pointed this out the last time I turned in a manuscript. She told me there were fewer setting details at the end of the book. She was right. There were, and that was by design.

I tend to write novels in which the action takes place in several repeated locations. For instance, my current project is set at a New England boarding school. This provides a contained locale. It also allows me to not waste the readers time by describing the setting more than once. I can focus on using setting details to establish tone within each scene. Dialogue drives my writing, and this consistent setting allows me to focus on that. It was Hemingway, after all, who said writing is architecture, not interior design.

The end of the novel, then, often feels like a sprint, which is what I believe my agent was saying. How sparse should the text be? How much detail does the reader really want at the end of a novel? I can answer for myself. As a reader, at the end of a novel I enjoy, I've got my head down, and the pages are turning. (I'm not even aware there are pages.) The awkward silences that existed in the opening moments of this first date with this novel have long since passed. By the time I reach the end of the book, the relationship is well established and we’re way beyond awkward silences.

I hope the ending of the novel I'm working on right now provides the reader with both an unexpected and logical solution. I also hope the climax and resolution of the novel were like being at the top of a roller coaster, teetering, just before the final descent. Because when the roller coaster starts down, you're not looking at what's around. You're concentrating only on what's coming at you, and the pages are turning on their own.

The Back Story

Recently in The Author there was an article by David Williams about the world's shortest stories. He quoted the tale that Ernest Hemingway was asked to produce one, on the promise of having his bar bill paid, and he came up with, 'For sale: baby shoes, never worn.'

Whether he wrote it or not, what a wealth of human tragedy lies in those few words! Margaret Atwood's attempt was a rather more cynical, 'Longed for him. Got him. Shit.'

Williams also quoted one of his own from his book, HE and SHE: 1000 stories in 1000 tweets, that I particularly liked: 'A Lasting Hand: Their marriage started with two hearts and a diamond. It ended with a club and a spade.' A crime novel in miniature.

They're all clever. They whet the curiosity and the answer to the questions the reader wants to ask could be a short story, or even a whole novel.

Wanting to know the back story is a fundamental human instinct. When we first meet someone we all ask what I call 'establishing' questions. Where do you live? What do you do? What family do you have? What books do you read? What films do you like? It's the way a meeting proceeds to a friendship.

When we introduce a main character to our readers, they need to know a bit about the back story if they're going to feel involved. The trouble is that we can't set down a list of attributes and tastes and a lot of personal history without slowing up the story and boring everyone rigid as well.

To be convincing, I need to know the answer to all these questions, even though I'll never actually write everything down. It's a gradual process, like getting to know a real person, but it's what makes them take on a life of their own. I sometimes found myself saying about DI Marjory Fleming, 'I didn't know she'd done that!' I hope that's what percolates through to the reader.

In the past months I've spent a lot of time learning the back story of a new detective, DI Kelso Strang. What drew me to write about him wasn't exactly a shortest-story-style tweet, but it was a very brief image that came into my head: a young man, his adored wife and their unborn baby fatally injured in a car accident, signing the paper to switch off her life-support.

Somehow the idea took possession of my mind and the new book, Human Face, comes out this month. I'll be writing about it in my next post.