Getting by with a little help from my friends & my murder book

The summer has come and (nearly) gone, as of this writing, and it was a whirlwind. In July, I founded and directed a summer writing institute for teenage writers. Actually, July was the easy part, the culmination of 13 months spent planning, designing, and recruiting both faculty and students, and I have Type M’s Frankie, Tom, and Barbara to thank for serving as three of my seven visiting artists.

So now, as the fall launches a new school year, and I prepare to do it all over again, I’ve also hit the second half of the novel I’m writing. This is where things get hard. I’m 45,000 words in, the story line has taken a rough shape, and it’s time to get serious about plotting and tying up loose ends. It was interesting to hear all three of my Type M friends speak about writing, about plotting in particular. Most are “pantsers,” writing, as they say, “by the seat of their pants,” not knowing where their book will go.

Elmore Leonard said he spent the first hundred papes getting to know the characters. I love writing the first hundred pages. Now, as I approach page two hundred, I recently returned to my personal “murder book,” the notebook where I write character sketches, plot ideas, and questions I have about the manuscript on which I’m working. It’s literally my murder book.

I read again this week (in a Mystery Writers of America publication honoring him) about Jeffrey Deaver’s hundred (or more)-page outlines. I wish –– I REALLY wish –– my brain worked that way. My murder book is as close as I get, and, believe me, I’ve tried to outline. The story, it seems, always has other ideas (or my subconscious does and those only appear when I really turn everything off and sit down at the desk).

The other day, I sat for six hours at a picnic bench in a loud water park as my 12-year-old daughter Keeley and her friend went up and down crazy slides, ball-point pen out, murder book open, and filled seven pages, creating would-be plot points and coming up with what (hopefully) is a surprise ending (one I didn’t see coming when I began the book).

So as I head into the fall, the murder book will remain open, allowing me to finish the work in progress while another year begins, and I get to do it all over again.

Staring out windows

A lot of time this week has been spent writing and thinking about writing. I’m at the fun stage of a book –– the part where I see the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. The outline I spent two months creating has been useful as a loose guide, but now I have an ending I like better than the one I thought up while penning the roadmap.

So…

I’m spending a lot of time thinking about the book.

My daughter, when she was six, once said, “You always say you’re writing, but every time I go in the office, you’re just staring out the window.”

“That’s writing,” I told her.

Not much has changed. Which is interesting because the outline was the thing that was going to change it all for me. Do the heavy lifting upfront and write the book any time I have a free moment. Just follow the outline. That was my plan last fall.

Funny how things work out. Or don’t.

I’m still glad I put the time into the outline, but, truth be told, I deviated after the first hundred pages, as I got to know the characters. Jeffrey Deaver gave a keynote address I once attended in which he said he worked 8 months on his outlines and 3 months writing the books. Hell, that still leaves him with a vacation month each year. I wish I had the same systematic approach. But I don’t. And I don’t think I will find it.

I had my 50th birthday in February, and I do believe that you can teach an old dog new tricks –– I use speech-to-text software to put ideas and even (very) rough chapters onto the page occasionally. I use text-to-speech apps to listen to my work when editing. But technological upgrades are not the same as thinking and working through plots and plot problems intellectually. Writing crime novels continues to be and will always be about posing the mystery you, the writer, will have trouble solving and then staring out the window until you find your solution –– no matter how many times your daughter walks in the room.

Or that’s how I think about it. And I didn’t need an outline to land there.

Joys of outlining

I equate being a literary agent –– and dealing with writers’ eccentricities (daily!) –– to herding cats. So I appreciate the work of my champion Ginger Curwen, who keeps me on the straight and narrow.

At a time when many agents no longer want to be frontline editors, Ginger reads (and rereads) my drafts and is always available when I need to bounce an idea off someone. That’s what I was doing last week, when Ginger and I exchanged a series of emails. In the final line of our exchange, she wrote, “Remember, when you start the Ellie POV book, outline, outline, outline!”

A page from my outline

I said I would try.

I have talked (and posted) about outlining and my reluctance to do so. When I was in grad school, it wasn’t considered “artistic” (I’ve come to realize that’s a useless word) to plan what you would write. Statements like, The characters just came to me, and I felt like I was just taking dictation when I wrote this permeated academic buildings. I recall a Robert B. Parker Publisher’s Weekly interview in which he described his reaction to that train of thought: he quipped something to the effect that if his characters started telling him what to write, he’d find immediate psychological help.

Similarly, at Left Coast Crime, many moons ago, Jeffrey Deaver, in his keynote, said he had created one-hundred-page outlines for three-hundred-page books. I was stunned. Eight months, he said, to create the outline. Three months to write the book. That didn’t seem to mesh with the No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader mentality I had adopted.

Still, on the heels of finishing a novel that required me to rewrite it –– cutting out a character to simplify the plot –– Ginger’s words seemed wise. So two weeks ago, I began in earnest.

I must say I’m not going to be anywhere near Mr. Deaver’s one hundred pages, but I do have something resembling screenplay scene descriptions for twenty-odd chapters, and counting. And this has given me space to think through and re-think-through plot points and characters’ roles as I go.

Perhaps most importantly, this work –– outlining the story before I write it –– feels safe. The canvas on which I’m working is wide, and changes can be made fluidly without wasting weeks and countless pages that someone who needs to perfect one page before moving on to the next great would, will, and does waste.

In short, I am enjoying the process of envisioning and re-envisioning the novel. Hell, I might be an outliner, after all.

Christmas Lights and Second Drafts

Christmas is upon us –– the season of good cheer, good food and drink, and time spent with close friends and family. For me, it’s also a time to regroup: I’m between semesters and chipping away on the second draft of a novel.

No two writers work the same way, and finding one’s process is like discovering how to tie a tie: You can hear about how to do it, even see it done, but until you actually finish a novel, you might as well stand before the mirror and try to do it backwards. Some writers outline. (Jeffery Deaver gave a keynote address I heard saying he spends eight months writing the outline, three writing the book.) Others say writing is like driving at night –– you can see only as far as your headlights, writing and plotting as you go. Other writers fall somewhere in between.

Part of developing a writing process is knowing your strengths and weaknesses. I do well to focus on character and dialogue, aspects that have always come easily. I’m never going to plot like Dan Brown. It’s simply not in my DNA. Moreover, I believe all writers, to some degree, write what we read. I grew up on series novels –– Parker, MacDonald, Chandler, Grafton, Paretsky, Burke (both Jan and James Lee) –– and I have no real interest in writing one-and-dones, stand-alones. Character interests me. I want to learn more about their lives in the vein Michael Connelly describes in his essay “The Mystery of Mystery Writing”: “The mystery has evolved in recent decades to be as much an investigation of the investigator as an inquiry of the crime at hand. Investigators now look inward for the solutions and means of restoring order. In the content of their own character, they find the clues” (Walden Book Report, September, 1998). I like to have a large canvas when I’m creating the arc of a character, a canvas that might span several books. I enjoy following a character, see her grow and develop and take on new challenges, and I enjoy books whose ill deeds expose moral ambiguity. All of this means the human condition is front and center in my plots: people do things, then, for relatively simple reasons.

So as I near the halfway point in draft No. 2, I’m taking inventory. The characters have come to life and are, fingers crossed, consistent and believable. Ditto the setting. The plot, though, has to be reeled in, simplified. I’m always looking for a way to find a twist at the end while honoring Poe’s and Chandler’s mandates that a mystery not only play fair with readers but also conclude with all necessary clues being front and center, unlike real-world crimes where aspects of the case always go unexplained. But much like the box marked “Christmas Lights” in my garage, this storyline needs someone to untangle it, and like that box in the garage, no amount of money will get my kids to do it for me. That means cutting and adding –– eliminating some red herrings, punching up other characters’ roles.

In the end, all I really want for Christmas is to not face draft No. 3.

Happy holidays!