My First Reader

 I have been fascinated with a thread that has been running on this blog for the past week, beginning with guest poster Annie Hogsett's entry of last weekend, concerning who we envision as our reader when we sit down to write. Do you have an audience in mind, or do you write to please yourself?

When I am writing, especially a first draft, I do have an audience of one - me. I write a story that I would like to read. I did not always do this. I used to try very hard to write for The General Reading Public. But I began to have some publishing success when I forgot that notion. I write about what interests me.

Then, when the editing and rewriting process begins, I listen to suggestions from my pre-publication readers (sometimes) and from my editor (always), and tweak the story as per instructions in order to broaden its appeal.

My audience, therefore, is probably people like me. Sadly for the scope of my appeal, I am not a teenage boy or a romance-starved young woman. I’m not judging hero tales or romance novels, here. I think they are great, but my interests run in other directions these days. I tried to write a romance novel once.I had a wonderful idea, and I really think it would have been a good story, but I couldn’t sustain my own interest, and the book petered out before it was finished. I’m sorry to say this, because a popular romance novel will sell ten times as many copies as a popular mystery.

Having made the statement that I strictly write what I like and to hell with the audience, I now have to admit that I’m lying. I do construct my current series to please myself, but there are many things I’d love to write about, yet am not brave enough to attempt.

Even that is not true. I do write them, but am not brave enough to try to have them published. I fear that if I did, someone would send men in white coats to chase me around with butterfly nets.

And so I haven’t thus far tried to sell Kafkaesque expositions on the nature of reality. Instead, for publication I write something else that entertains me - historical mysteries.

I wonder how much can we tell about an author from what he writes? I know that when I read book reviews, I can often tell more about the reviewer than the book. Does an author reveal himself in his novels? Are authors like the characters they write about? Do they have the same fears and anxieties? Are they as intrepid, grieving, hapless, innocent, weary, or clever?

I’m an Oklahoman who has, until recently, written about Oklahoma.Am I like my protagonist, Alafair? In some ways, I wish I were, but I don’t think so.I live a hundred years later, I’m twenty years older, and childless, to begin with. Neither am I brave, intuitive, or nearly so sure of myself. Am I like my upcoming protagonist, Bianca LaBelle. Hardly. She's a willful, 21 year old adventuress who is as lucky as she is beautiful. I create a being with the qualities I wish I had, and live vicariously through her. I also indulge some of my more evil inclinations when I write, and not always through the villains. Do you do the same, Dear Fellow Author?

P.S. I’m building up my courage, so never fear, someday you’ll be able to read my Kafkaesque exposition on the nature of reality. While I’m writing it, I’ll laugh, I’ll cry, I’ll break my heart. And if I’m good enough at it, maybe you will too.

S'Mores and Ghosts

It is a few days after Halloween and the Day of Dead as you are reading this, Dear Reader, but I, Donis, am writing it on Halloween day itself, which has put me in mind of Halloweens past and loved ones past as well.

Every Halloween, my father-in-law dug a pit in back of the house, lined it with bricks, filled it with wood, and lit what he called a "bonfire", though it was more like a good sized campfire. The family would sit around it and roast wieners and marshmallows on sticks and stretched-out hangars. I have no idea where the family tradition came from, but I'm guessing it was passed down through the family from the misty past, for such traditions are remarkably enduring. So, if you live in the country or don't worry about being fined for building an open fire in your back yard, stretch out those hangars and get yourself a bag of marshmallows, and take a trip into the past with some campfire s'mores.

Put a slab of Hershey bar on top of a Graham cracker, put a melty-hot roasted marshmallow on the chocolate, top with another Graham cracker, and enjoy.

Of course Halloween didn’t used to be about s'mores, or trick-or-treat, or candy. In the Celtic tradition it is the turning of the year, the one day that the veil between the world of the living and the world of the dead thins, and thus we may be able to see our departed loved ones.

The Celtic peoples who came to the New World early on and settled on the frontiers and the back woods, from whom many, many of us descend, myself included, had a view of existence that is very different from contemporary Westerners see things. We wonder how such tough and practical people could have so readily believed in ghosts and haints. It had to be because they were ignorant and uneducated, we think, and obviously not as smart as we are.

But I say, au contraire, my friends.  As I travel through this life, I begin to have an intimation that things are not necessarily what they seem. We perceive the world as we have been taught to do. We see what we are looking for.

My great-grandmother, whom I was privileged to know when I was a girl, knew there were spirits abroad just as firmly as she knew the sky was blue.  She had seen them, and she believed the evidence of her own eyes.  Did she really see them, or was she deluded?  I’ve never seen a ghost.  Am I realistic, or am I blind?  How does a sighted person convince someone who has never seen that there is a color blue?

My great-grandmother

My protagonist, Alafair, perceives the universe in the same way my great-grandmother did, and I do not judge her for that. In fact, maybe I’m a bit envious.

The Exciting Climax

I’m in the midst of writing the climax to All Men Fear Me, my latest Alafair Tucker novel. It’s the big reveal, when the reader finds out whodunnit, and more importantly, when Alafair finds out whodunnit. Maybe she confronts the killer. Then what does she do? When I begin writing a new mystery novel, I usually know who the murderer is, and sometimes I know how and why s/he did it. I may also have an idea how the killer went about trying to cover up the crime. I’m pretty good about doling out clues at appropriate intervals throughout the story. But here’s the hard part: Alafair, my protagonist, has to figure out who did the deed.

And that is not easy, my friend, because I have to do it in such a way that is realistic and makes sense.

Alafair is not a law enforcement professional or a private investigator. She doesn’t do this for a living, nor does she have any official authority to compel people to answer her questions. She also lives in an era when people are constrained by fairly rigid gender roles. In fact, question number one is: what is she doing trying to solve a murder, anyway? The first thing I have to do is give her a really compelling reason to get involved at all.

Then I have to give her the means and the opportunities to uncover information and make connections, and I can’t force the action to fit the outcome I want. In other words, I can’t have Alafair doing things that a woman with the resources she has couldn’t do. I can’t have her act against her own nature, either, just to advance the plot or create tension in an artificial way.
This is the reason I’ve been known to stare at the screen for an hour when I’m at a critical juncture, thinking “how can I get Alafair off the farm and into that office in town to search for the gun, before sundown, when she has a bunch of kids and a husband, all of whom want dinner?”

I could just have her up and leave and let everyone fend for himself, or I could contrive to have all the children and the husband go out to eat at whatever the 1917 equivalent of McDonald’s was. But if I did that, I have a feeling I’d hear about it from disgruntled readers. Not to mention a horrified editor. Sometimes I just can’t come up with a plausible way to do it, and I have to go at it from a totally different angle or rework the scene altogether.

This is one of the things I like about writing an amateur sleuth. She has to be sneaky, persistent, smart, and clever in order to find her answers. And sometimes, she’s smarter than I am. In fact, there have been occasions where Alafair came upon a clue that I was not aware of myself until it appeared on the page. Toward the end of my fourth book in the series, The Sky Took Him, Alafair was sitting in a hospital corridor, having a nice, normal, conversation with the family, when she noticed something at exactly the same time I did, an observation which provided both of us with a vital piece of information. It surprised the heck out of me, but it was plausible, very much in character for Alafair, and worked like a charm. Moments like this are why writing a mystery can be such fun.