A Little Something on the Side

 I learn a lot from the funnies page in the newspaper. I'm a puzzle aficionado, and start every day by reading the paper front to back, and then working all the puzzles. This is not quite the time consuming activity it use to be a few years go, when the daily paper actually had news in it. But at least the puzzles get my brain revved up for the day. One of my favorite puzzles is the Jumble, which consists of an anagram of a quotation from a well-known person. Not long ago I deciphered a quotation by Truman Capote which as a writer, I found quite insightful. It was as follows:

Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music.

Perspective is a sense of depth. It's a way to show things in their true relationship to one another, a way to make them seem real.

The characters who people a novel are what the majority of readers care about the most. Action and suspense and an intricate plot are all fantastic, but if we aren't invested in the characters, we don't much care if they get it all worked out, or if they escape the danger, or figure out who did the deed. And if the author can create a series with true and appealing characters, then the reader will want to read the next installment, and the next.

So, your characters are involved in the intricacies of the plot. The sleuth has to find out who committed the crime, or who is chasing him, and why. The red herring suspects have to prove they didn't do it. The killer has to throw the hunters off his trail. But if the characters only exist to serve the plot, so what? If instead, the plot exists to reveal the characters ... now you're talking.

What does this have to do with perspective, you ask? Well, Have a seat, for I'm about to tell you.

A side story exists in a novel for the sole purpose of adding depth. It's through a side story that the reader discovers why the sleuth is like she is. Why is she so obsessive about unravelling the crime, even though she's been removed from the case, or fired by the client, or threatened with death if she perseveres? Could it be because the victim so reminds her of her own mother, who was also a battered woman? We find this out not because the author simply tells us, but because the sleuth goes home after a long day of detecting, and her mother is there, fixing dinner. We discover through successive scenes, actions and conversations, that her mother is physically and psychologically damaged from years of abuse. Perhaps Mom is agoraphobic. Perhaps she finally shot her abuser and spent time in prison. Perhaps the sleuth was ten years old when this happened, and to this day is riddled with guilt that she wasn't able to help her mother at the time.

None of this has to do with the major plot line, which concerns the discovery in an alley of a murdered woman whose body shows signs of years of trauma. Was she perhaps a professional show-jump rider, or a downhill skier? A roller derby skater?  Or maybe she was a battered woman. Our sleuth can't help her now, just as she couldn't help her mother. But maybe she can show the poor woman justice.

The side story has given the sleuth a life apart from her job. Now the reader knows her as a person, and we hope, cares abut her and is rooting for her to succeed.

In the Weeds, or Keeping the Reader Interested Through the Middle of Your Novel

I, Donis, was fascinated by Barbara’s entry, below, on writing about sex. How much is enough, how much is too much? When do you cross the line and offend your reader? Myself, I usually skip over the graphic sex scenes, mainly because they tend to bore me. There are only two people in the world whose sex life interests me at all—mine and my husband’s. As for the rest of you, enjoy yourselves but leave me out of it.

I’m working on the the middle part of my WIP right now. The beginning flowed right out of me. I knew exactly what I wanted to say to set up the novel. I have a great idea for an ending, if I can pull it off. But getting from here to there isn’t as easy as I hoped. I know which direction I’m going, but I seem to have veered off the road a little and am finding myself a little bit lost in the weeds. Long ago I learned that one way to keep the middle part of your book interesting and not get bogged down is to have at least one interesting side story going. And as long as they are interesting and add depth to the novel, I don’t even mind two or three side stories. You just need to keep people reading. Maybe I need a sex scene…

The only problem with that idea is that graphic sex really wouldn’t fit in this particular series about a married mother and grandmother in 1919. My long time readers would definitely be surprised, to say the least. Of course, we all keep our target audiences in mind, and try to write material that will not offend them so much that they won’t buy our subsequent books. We don’t want to be killing any kitties or puppies unless we absolutely have to for the integrity of the novel. Nor do we wish to go too far beyond the language/sex/violence parameters set by our publishers or agents or editors lest they decide no longer to publish us.

But there are times when the story you are telling just calls for something shocking, or it won’t ring true. My self-censorship problems have to do with the mores of the times and the place I’m writing about in my current series. In 1910s Oklahoma, there were a lot of common and wide-spread attitudes that we in the 21st Century would find unsavory in the extreme – casual racism, even among people of good will who would never knowingly harm another person of any color; assumptions about women and people of other ethnicities; the treatment of children. Can you imagine what would happen today if a parent took a belt to a whiny child in the grocery store? In 1919, it would be expected. Language, too. Words that today would give the hearer a stroke were tossed about with abandon and nobody batted an eye. And I don’t mean just epithets, either. My grandmother, a farm wife with the straightest laces you can possibly imagine, used all kinds of what we would now call scatological words. In her society, crude words for excrement didn’t have nearly the cachet they now have, probably because farm people were up to their knees in it every day of their lives.

But I don’t want readers to judge my characters by modern standards and thus think less of them. Nor do I want to present early 20th Century societal shortcomings in a way that makes light of them or seems approving. So how do I deal with the reality of the time and place? Very, very carefully, let me tell you.