Changing Directions

Ever been in the midst of one writing project when another grabbed you by the arm, said, "Me! Me!" and wouldn't let go?

In a post last year, I described my new strategy for staying organized and being more productive. I had been reading books and articles and based on the research findings and expert advice on the subject, I intended to:

a. Stop multitasking and focus on one project (at least for that day)
b. Do "the next logical thing" (the most important task with the most urgent deadline)

Sounded good. Been trying to do it. Hasn't worked. Here's why:

a. I always have more than one writing project going on at the same time -- a nonfiction project and a mystery. I can alternate back and forth between the two, but I can't simple press "pause" and come back to one or the other in a few months or even a week or two. I need to keep both moving along. I like dividing my day between the two and seeing progress on both. The shift in focus is energizing.
b. Doing the next logical thing according to importance and urgency seemed to have promise. Must finish my crime and clothing book this summer. Working on that. Really want to finish my standalone 1939 historical thriller. Agent wants me to finish. I want to get it done. Could be important to my career. Working on that, too.

And then something happened. My last Lizzie Stuart book came out in 2011. I started to write my Hannah McCabe police procedural books set in Albany in the near-future. But I wrote a Lizzie short story that was published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine in July 2014 (podcast of "In Her Fashion") . I knew I would come back to Lizzie sooner or later.

But I didn't have a book idea in mind. I knew that in the next book, she would go with John Quinn, her fiance to meet his family. I knew that would happen Thanksgiving week 2004, and they would go to Santa Fe. That's it. I assumed the mystery would happen there. . .until a few months ago when the first scene in the book came to me. That was when I knew Lizzie would be distracted during her visit with her future in-laws by something that had happened the night before she and Quinn left Gallagher, Virginia.

Okay, I made a note or two and tried to go back to what I was doing. A scene -- even a vivid scene -- was no reason to let this book step out of the queue. I wanted to work on my 1939 thriller.

But that scene kept nagging at me, and I found myself telling a friend about it over dinner. As it happens this friend is the person with whom I always talk out sticky plot points. She knows my characters, and she's a lawyer with a logical mind. (Notice that I have great respect for logic because I sometimes run to intuition and need to refocus). So, I told her about this scene and that I wasn't sure what it was about. She threw out an idea or two. I listened. And went home and made a few notes. Still a back-burner project.

Until earlier this week when I was reading a criminal justice report that had nothing to do with the Lizzie book and suddenly another character walked on stage. A character with a problem that would pull Lizzie into the investigation. And bring back one of my favorite characters. A subplot that should get me through that sagging middle and give Lizzie even more motivation than she originally had for getting involved.

So now, I'm working on the clothing and crime book. That is moving along. But my 1939 thriller has been pushed aside by Lizzie. The characters in the 1939 book are not protesting. They seem to be fine with my promise that I will continue to make notes and tinker with my complex plot outline. I suspect that's because there is something about the Lizzie book that is going to be relevant to the 1939 thriller. As I may have mentioned, all of my research and writing seems to occupy the same universe. Lizzie is a crime historian, maybe while I'm doing research for whatever she's working on in the past. . .

So I'm kicking logic to the curb. I'm going to go in the direction that I'm being pulled and trust that it's my subconscious at work and not my way of avoiding the challenge of my standalone. I'm trusting that my 1939 book needs something that I'll find while writing a book set in in 2004. We'll see what happens. I just hope I'm not halfway through the Lizzie book when suddenly I need to head back to 1939 and start writing.

Have you ever changed directions? Switched your focus from one book to another?

Ugly World

Donis here today. I am writing this entry on the day after the Orlando massacre. There is nothing enlightening I can say. No brilliant insight or suggestions.

When I first saw the news, I was immediately reminded of something my grandmother said to me many years ago.

"I've lived through wars and deaths and upheavals and bad times," she said, "but I've never seen things as bad as this."

That was in about 1972. It seems that human nature never changes, especially when it comes to man's inhumanity to man.

I once heard a woman on NPR relate that her five year old daughter once came stomping down the stairs in a snit and demanded to know why we were ever born if we're just going to die anyway.

An excellent question that should convince anyone that children are deeper than adults give them credit for. The mother said she pondered for a minute before answering, because she wanted to give the girl a meaningful answer, and finally she replied that it was because of all the stuff that goes on in between.

Billy Graham was asked what he had learned about life, and he said that he was just surprised at how fast it goes by. I think of that quite a bit, especially when it comes home to me that not one day more is guaranteed to us. Anything can happen at any time. And even if I live out the rest of my natural life in peace, at this point I have less time ahead than I do behind. I wonder why on earth I ever spend time doing things I don't have to do that I don't particularly enjoy.

Carolyn Hart told me once that she thought the popular resurgence of mystery novels was due at least in part to the fact that at least in a mystery novel, justice is usually done in the end. I like to think that mystery novelists are people of compassion, who are doing what they can to impart to the reader a sense of order and rightness in a world that is messy and incomprehensible and unjust.

Or at least divert them with a ripping yarn.

Editing yourself, Part Two

Barbara here. Two weeks ago I posted a blog describing my own, very personal process to editing once I've typed “The End” on the soggy, barely coherent 90,000-word mess that constitutes my first draft. Because I'm basically a pantser, there are a lot of plot holes, character inconsistencies, and dropped threads to be fixed up before the book makes much sense at all, and this macro-editing has to be addressed first. That lengthy, unwieldy, and challenging process was the subject of June 1st's blog.

This week's blog is about fine-tuning. I call it micro-editing, because this is the point where I examine the text page by page, line by line, and word by word. Naturally, because plot holes can trip you up in the most unlikely places, I keep an eye out for any remaining big-picture problems, but I am mainly concerned here with the power, precision, and economy of my prose.

Aline's Monday post about the difference between printed and on-screen reading is relevant here. To get the big picture of my novel, I always have to print it out to read and to make my changes in pen on the hard copy. I then transcribe those changes back onto computer and reprint it for the second go-around, and the third, etc. I do some tightening and fine-tuning as well during this process if the problem leaps out at me (if, for example, I use the same word three times in one paragraph) but my mind is on bigger things.

Once I have a fairly clean, final “big picture” copy, I read it through on the screen. As Aline says, the screen focuses on details without the distraction of the whole, and so I can examine my work one sentence at a time. I check for redundancies and superfluous words, for those silly extra adverbs and adjectives, for clumsy constructions and words that clang when read together. I look for length of sentence to ensure variety, chopping some up and combining others. Language should create a rhythm that draws the reader on rather than stopping them short.

Also in this micro-editing, I look at how effectively and vividly my words create images. I bear in mind the key points to good writing; show, don't tell, describe like a painter, not a photographer, remember the five senses. A few evocative, defining details will capture a character and setting far better than an exhaustive description. All this fine-tuning is done directly on the screen.

Once the manuscript is the best I think I can make it, I let it sit for as long as I can, which is sometimes only a few days, so that I have relatively fresh eyes for my last read-through. In hard copy. A final polishing, and it is ready for my beta readers. The advantages and disadvantages of critiquing groups is a topic in itself, but the group I use—my good friends The Ladies Killing Circle—are all experienced writers with novel series and/ or short stories of their own, and quite a lot of practice with an editor's pen. Because we have worked together a long time, we trust each other to be both honest and helpful, and I know that each brings a different perspective to the table. Some catch the character weaknesses, others the overall "feel" of the book, others the logic, the language, etc.

Each sends me back a list of comments, all of which I take seriously as I weigh their value and consider whether and how to address them. All writers, but particularly mystery writers, need objective input because, after a dozen or so rewrites, we are too close to the story. We don't know whether the ending is too obvious, the clues too obscure, the motives clearly enough explained, etc. Having beta readers who are skilled as both writers and readers, but also respect your style and don't try to rewrite your book for you, can strengthen your story tremendously.

By the end of this intensive process, what started as an incoherent muddle should be ready for the editor. Hopefully most of the hard work is already done.

Great ways NOT to write a book

by Rick Blechta

I’m certain I am not alone among writers in admiring how well I’ve polished my procrastination skills to a fine sheen when I sit down to advance a work-in-progress. Not.

It’s incredible how things transpire against me some days. Right now, the Blue Jays are playing. Okay. I decided beforehand that I would have the game on, but the sound off and the browser window down on the dock (in other words, not viewable unless I make it so). Well, that lasted all of ten minutes. As a matter of fact, as I’m writing this, the sound is back on, but at least my text edit program is covering up the browser window.

As for the WIP, um, I wrote two sentences before realizing it was Tuesday and I hadn’t even thought about a topic for this weeks post!

Here are some other favourite pastimes for not writing a book:

• Making dinner (or lunch or breakfast or a snack)
• Remembering I didn’t fill the bird feeder
• Answering the phone/door/an email petition
• Taking a nap because all of a sudden I can’t keep my eyes open
• Internet research for an upcoming plot point
• Sharpening pencils (oh wait…I’m writing on the computer today)
• Answering the phone and then talking at length
• More internet research
• Re-reading what I’ve already written
• Writing a blog post I could have written over the weekend (and meant to – honest!)

You’re probably getting the picture. It’s easy to just not get it done. Why this happens I don’t know. The only cure for me is a cabin in the woods with no internet connection, ear plugs so I can’t hear that mysterious bird song I’d like to identify, no one around to talk with and no phone. Unfortunately that can’t happen to often because of other commitments.

Next up after writing this post is to spend at least an hour designing a really fine sign for the wall of my office: Just Write The Damn Book! If I execute the design in colour, that will also mean a trip to Staples. While I’m at it, I'll print out a fresh Round Tuit*. My current one is getting rather careworn.
_________________________
*If you’d like your own Round Tuit, just leave a comment with your email address, and I’ll fire over a hi-res version that you can print out for yourself and all your friends.

The Comeback of the Printed Word

The recent flat-lining of for sales of ebooks and the rise for sales of what I admit I call 'proper' books have astonished the pundits who not so very long ago were predicting the demise of the printed word altogether. I have to admit I believed them, and was dismayed.

Will I never learn?  How often in the past have the prophets of doom, like the Victorians who wrung their hands about the problem of increased traffic in London that would mean the streets being completely impassible because of horse manure, been wrong? Yet still I worried about it. I never felt that I got as much out of a book when reading it online – smoking without inhaling, I call it.

This is, apparently, true. There is now quite a body of research that proves comprehension and retention are both poorer when the information is absorbed from a screen. In one study, students who revised from printed books had an advantage of ten per cent over the others in the following test, and a recent poll pf students found that 80 per cent of them wanted print because they believed it helped them understand with more clarity.

There are a number of suggested reasons for this. Whether an individual realises it or not, there is a marked tendency to approach ereaders and tablets in a state of mind less conducive to absorption, and just looking at a screen, too, drains more of our mental resources. It forces the reader to focus on one very small section at a time, without awareness of the whole book. One researcher suggests that it is as if a Google map could find you the individual address, but didn't allow you to zoom out to what lay around it on all sides.

And of course, a book is a physical pleasure too – the texture of the pages, the smell, the rhythmic sound of turning pages that act like leaving footprints on a trail.

When you read this, I will be on holiday in France. Yes, Kindle is very useful when you're travelling by air and have a limited baggage allowance. Fortunately, though, we're driving there and tucked away in the boot will be the book box that is a the heart of our holiday, a varied collection amassed with love over the last few weeks. I can't wait to get my hands on them.

Weekend Guest -- Lisa Black

I'm delighted to welcome Lisa Black to Type M as our weekend guest.

Lisa has spent over 20 years in forensic science, first at the coroner’s office in Cleveland Ohio and now as a certified latent print examiner and CSI at a Florida police dept. Her books have been translated into 6 languages, one reached the NYT Bestseller’s List and one has been optioned for film and a possible TV series.

Lisa's latest book came out in April.

In her post, she shares a behind-the-scene look at her writing process.

Take it away, Lisa.

WRITING ON A WHIM…

…has always sounded like a bad idea to me, sure to leave you written into a corner at some future point just as hitching a ride on a lonely stretch of road with a shaggy looking stranger in a panel van is a foolproof way to wind up dead in a ditch somewhere. I’m a plotter. I’m not at the extreme end of the plotter/pantser spectrum but I am definitely along that half of the line. I have to know how the story begins, how it ends, who the killer is, why they kill, and just about every other major incident that will take place, and I need to know all this before I begin writing.

And so that was how I began to write Close to the Bone, I had my setting and my characters and in the second chapter my forensic scientist character is creeping around her workplace (a morgue) in the wee, dark hours of the morning looking for a killer who has left her coworker in a puddle of his own blood on the first floor.

My agent didn’t like it. She didn’t think it was suspenseful enough. I pointed out: Dark. Empty. Building. Killer on the loose. Personally known victim. Lots of blood. If that’s not suspense then what the heck is?

In a burst of sullenness I sat down and churned out a few pages of a scene that had been rattling around in my head for years, in which a man decides that the worst of the worst criminals should be put down like rabid dogs, but humanely, compassionately. After all, they can’t help what the circumstances of their lives have brought them to. So he wines and dines them, and in the midst of a pleasant conversation he puts three bullets into their skull.

She liked it.

So of course I had to have a female forensic investigator who notices similarities among outwardly different crimes. But I had no idea what to do beyond that, except that, at some point, these two would have to come in to contact with each other. To which I’m sure you’d all say, well duh.

Somehow I managed to get through the book without a plan. Then it was time to write the sequel. I had an idea about this wealthy, sprawling family that turns out to have disproportionate amount of sudden death twining about its tree. I started it on New Year’s Day; I thought that gave the process a nice air of orderliness. By January 6th I realized it wasn’t going to work—too much backstory, too much plodding through individual histories. So I sat in a lawn chair and told myself that I needed a better setting—something alive with tension and immediacy and real danger.

A newspaper, I decided. If people turn up dead at a newspaper, is it because of a story they wrote? Or didn’t write? Or were going to write? Or is it for another reason, some personal conflict that has nothing to do with a story at all? I dove in and loved studying up on the changes in the news industry over the past twenty or so years, and I love the result, but the fact remains that I decided that course on an impulse—something I hate with the same passion gardeners reserve for aphids.

But sometimes you just have to go wherever the whim takes you.

When Events Go Wrong

A couple of weeks ago I witnessed one of the most glorious examples of how to recover when an event goes astray. My granddaughter was married in Manteo North Carolina and the bride, groom, and the parents had worked hard to create a beautiful outdoor venue. Both grandmothers, the groom’s parents, and most of the groomsmen were bused in from various hotels.

The bride and bridesmaids were preparing in the special event center where we would all go after the ceremony for a dinner with dancing to follow.

We gathered under trees overlooking the bay awaiting the magical moment when the bride and her ladies would emerge. The sea sparkled in the background. Artful arrangements of flowers perfected the fairyland setting. We were moments away from taking our seats.

The weather was perfect. And then it wasn’t. The skies opened.

Both grandmothers, the groom, the mother of the groom, most of the groomsmen, and various other participants were sloshed in a sudden downpour. Not a sprinkle, mind you. A cascade of water. Immediate and devastating.

Safely inside, the bride, the mother-of the bride, and the sheltered members of the wedding immediately flew into high gear. Their hardest task was coaxing the miserable sodden guests to run through sheets of water to the event center. Once inside, the wedding planner announced there would be a slight delay. We were given hair dryers and patted with paper towels. It didn’t help much.

Tables were moved from the center of the floor to form an aisle, the orchestra relocated to a balcony, a staging area created, and the bride processed between columns of joyful (standing) friends. What a splendid predictor of happiness in the marriage!!! Adjustment was immediate, in tandem, and victory created when the afternoon could have culminated in tears, tantrums, and an ugly melt-down.

Handling events gone wrong is one of the most difficult lessons I’ve had to learn in a writing career. It’s especially disheartening to set up a signing, arrive and learn the store owner has not ordered books, or the books are there but the people aren’t. Anticipated fans all went fishing or something.

I wonder how many pages I would need to list all the things that have gone wrong in my writing career. Many more would be needed to list all the stupid things I’ve said or done. I regret the length of time it’s taken to learn to face adverse events with humor and a sense of perspective. It takes a long, long time to learn how to flip misfortunes into opportunities.

I envy my lovely granddaughter and her splendid husband. They are beginning their marriage with attributes it usually takes a lifetime to acquire.

Rabbit Holes

Destiny's Pawn hits shelves this week, and I hit the road, signing and doing author talks. All this while I'm writing the fourth Peyton Cote book (2017), which is due to my publisher Sept. 1.

The new book deals with human trafficking, and to write it I did all the right things: I outlined it (took me a week), I created character sketches (so I could use multiple characters' third-person, limited points of view), and I researched, reading ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (highly recommended) and various online articles, even e-mailing professors and experts on the Syrian situation.

The research took weeks. When I finally sat down to write, I finished 30 pages pretty quickly. As often happens, I hit a plot snag, so I slowed, researched more, and continued on, albeit at a slower pace. Around page 50, I needed to do additional research. I ended up on the phone for an hour with Kevin Stevens, former deputy chief of the US Border patrol. Then I plotted some more. The result was a 60-page Google doc that had my marginal notes ("comments") that ran the entire length of some of the draft's pages.

And I walked around the house like a zombie, the storyline, the characters, the information forming a kaleidoscope in my head.

When my wife asked what the book was about – and it took ten minutes to describe it to her – I knew I was in serious trouble.

"Isn't there a way to simplify it?" she said.

"Oh, there is," I said.

It's not the death penalty, but it's close: I stopped and started again, writing the story from only the third-person, limited point of view of Peyton Cote. It wasn't an easy decision, especially since Destiny's Pawn is told, successfully, from the point of view of several characters. However, the narrative structure of Destiny's Pawn – using multiple points of view – was dictated by the story itself: Simply put, Peyton cannot realistically have access to information the reader needs for the book to hold up. But book four is a different story, one that can be told from Peyton's perspective. So I've climbed out of the wrong rabbit hole, and the book is going well. (It's due, after all, Sept. 1, so it has to go well.)

Writers face many choices when we begin a book (or even get 50 pages in). Some choices are predictable. Others come at you sideways. But any choice a writer makes must benefit the work itself. As Hemingway said, novel writing "is architecture, not interior decoration."

People Are People

Sybil here. I returned from a short vacation with my brain clearer and notes from my editor on book 3 waiting for me in my inbox. As always, I appreciate her insights and, as always, I groan when she tells me about continuity errors that I should have caught and are, of course, obvious when pointed out. So now I’m busy reworking A PALETTE FOR MURDER, moving a few scenes around, working on my characters, fixing plot holes that somehow I didn’t notice. No matter how much effort I put into it, there’s always something that sneaks through, probably because after awhile you lose all perspective on your own work. That’s why I love my editor. She may not tell me what I want to hear, but she always makes the story better.

When I’m not writing, one of the things I do is study Ancient Egyptian with a group of like-minded people, something I’ve been doing for 20 years or so. This week we started translating texts known as Letters to the Dead. These are texts that span the period of the Late Old Kingdom (about 2686-2181 BC) to the late New Kingdom (about 1550-1069 BC).

The letters are written to dead relatives asking them to intercede on a still living person’s behalf to address a problem or right a wrong. The letter we started looking at this week was written on a pottery bowl and found in a tomb dated to Late Old Kingdom to First Intermediate Period.

On the outside of the bowl is a letter from Shepsi to his mother, Iy; on the inside is a letter to his father, Iinekhenmut. This letter was written in hieratic, not the hieroglyphs most people are used to, probably by a scribe hired to do the work. This is the text on the inside of the bowl.

Apparently, Shepsi is having a bit of a property dispute and he believes his dead brother is interfering with his ability to get all of his father’s property. He reminds good old dad that he said “All my property shall remain with my son Shepsi.” And he tells his father that he buried his brother properly, but he’s still having problems. Basically, he’s asking his dead father to intervene in the afterlife, at the court of the underworld, to put an end to the problem. Even though this was written over 4000 years ago, you can still feel the frustration radiating off of the bowl. Shepsi has done everything he should do, he’s been a good son and brother, and he’s still having problems!

What does this have to do with writing, you say? I think it serves as a reminder that people are people no matter when they lived. Our world may look completely different from Ancient Egypt but, really, we’re all still the same creatures. Something that’s good for a writer to remember.

Poor Shepsi, I wonder if he ever got his dispute settled to his satisfaction.

A "State of the Union" on e-books

by Rick Blechta

I've been meaning to write this post for a few weeks, but unfortunately, family issues have kept that from happening. Sorry about the missing/poor posts of the past few weeks, but that's the way it goes sometimes.

But I'm back today and have something really interesting in the print versus e-book world. First, you have a reading assignment (and if you're interested in this sort of topic, then I guarantee it won't be onerous!): How-apple-and-big-publishers-pushed-e-books-toward-failure.

Who would have thunk it? For a few years now, everyone in the book industry has been trumpeting or mourning the death of paper books – depending on whose side of the fence you're on – and now it seems that paper and e are finding their natural levels in the marketplace. It's not as if everyone was letting this happen naturally. Publishers and retailers were all trying to manipulate how book commerce was going to proceed. The courts certainly had a lot of do with what has been shaking down, but I'm willing to bet that if left alone, purchasers of books would have done a fine job by themselves in sorting out how these two ways of consuming reading would operate and what market share they would have as things went forward.

As for price, that's a different matter and the way this all has come to a head. Retailers and producers have always worked – both separately and in concert – to set the price of what the public buys. It's only natural that both these entities would want to control prices absolutely. Amazon is certainly within its writes to set whatever retail price it wants, just as publishers should be allowed to set their price. The rub comes when the retailer (in this case Amazon) tries to unilaterally dictate the wholesale price to producer (in this case publishers) in a take-it-or-leave-it scenario. That's where the whole thing breaks down. I find it almost astounding that Amazon decided to back down, considering the stranglehold they have on book sales of any kind. I'm sure it's all driven by dollars and cents as it always is.

The fact that Apple decided to carry on the fight even as the Big 5 publishers settled with Amazon and the Supreme Court forced the issue by declining to hear the case as much as would have been the case had they decided to hear it and render a decision.

So, as is always the case, prices will continue to go up (which is the normal order of commerce) and you can be sure at the end of the day that the consumer and the author (the real producers in publishing) will be getting the short end of the stick. But no matter what...

Making a Difference

 By Vicki Delany

I sometimes think that as fiction writers we don’t really make much of a difference in people’s lives, or have any significant impact.

When I look at my own reading, I can identify a handful of books that had an impact on me. Lord of the Rings, The Crystal Cave, Keeping Watch by Laurie R. King. The early V.I. Warshawski books by Sara Paretsky.. To Kill a Mockingbird (and for that reason alone I have not, and will not read the supposed new Harper Lee Book).

And that’s pretty much it. I like to read, I read a lot, and I read a variety of books.  But they don’t affect my life or my way of thinking.  For that, I’d mainly list non-fiction books.  The one that really had a huge impact on my entire view of the world is March of Folly by Barbara W. Tuchman (Many years ago I worked on a friend’s political campaign for MP.  She won, and I gave her that book.

I write books and my goal is to entertain people and if they get a little insight into another way of living or thinking (or, as in More Than Sorrow, an entirely different way of seeing history) more the better.

But it’s not my goal.

Last week I had the honour of attending the Ontario Library Association’s literacy convention luncheon. The Golden Oak Award for adult literacy book was being given out.  There were eight shortlisted books including my Juba Good (from Orca Book’s Rapid Reads imprint).

Each book and attending author was introduced by one of the literacy students.

The young woman who introduced me, and talked about how much she loved Juba Good, told us it was the sixth book she’d read.

EVER

Think about that.  She was perhaps in her mid-twenties and in her entire life she had read SIX books.  (She was, BTW, English speaking, so it wasn’t just a matter of reading in a new language.)

Wow! I thought. I really did have an impact.

Now or Later

Barbara's post on Wednesday reminded me again that I shall never a pantser be. Every time another writer describes the process of plunging in and powering through a first draft, I am stunned. Well, not as much as I used to be. But I am still struck by how different our processes are when it comes to writing a book. 

I think of myself as a hybrid, falling between pantsers and plotters in my approach. But the truth is, even though I don't put every scene down on paper before beginning, I do have a mental outline. That outline in my head evolves and changes as I get to know my characters. I need to know my characters pretty well before I can begin to write. I need to know what motivates them. I may be wrong, but I need to believe I know why they are about to do what I expect them to do. Of course, sometimes as I learn more, they do something I didn't expect. In fact, that often happens. But I set out with the sense that I know what is going to happen and why.

Instead of plunging in, I try out scenes in my head. I have gotten better at this over the years. But it is still a lengthy process. I have been trying to get past the first couple of scenes in my 1939 thriller for months. I thought the opening scene would be at Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday. While I was at a writers retreat in Vermont last summer, I dashed off that first scene to share during our evening reading. I thought I would be able to move on from there. I had introduced my protagonist. I had introduced his foe. We were ready to be off and running. But here I am, months later, writing and rewriting that scene.

I've mentioned before that I need to warm up before I can begin to write. That first fifty pages that I write over and over. But this has been something different. Even though I thought I was beginning the book in the right place, it felt wrong. I tried going back to the train station and showing my protagonist, a sleeping car porter, rushing to get to Marian Anderson's concert. Stopping to help a woman find her grandchild in the crowded station, trying to get a taxi, arriving late and finding himself in the back of the crowd. Seeing his antagonist. . .

I thought I had it when I wrote that scene. It took me two tries and two failures to launch to realize that opening was wrong, too.

Then a few days ago it came to me. A scene involving my villain that was directly related to the title of the book and that neither he nor I saw coming. What happened scared us both silly. If my villain is on his own "hero's journey," he is now committed to his path. And that elevates the encounter with my protagonist at Lincoln Memorial -- an encounter that I can write from my protagonist's point of view with no words spoken between them. 

I think it's going to work. It feels right. But I still haven't put it down on paper because what happens in my new first chapter has given me information that I didn't have before about my villain.

A pantser would plunge forward. I'm deliberating. Hybrids and plotters are more prone to edit as we go along. To edit before we even start to write. To edit as we are writing. That doesn't suck the life out of the story for me. But it does mean that the first draft does take forever to finish.

On the other hand, when I write "the end,"there are revisions left to do but no major rewrites. My revision process begins with the chapter summaries I wrote as I was doing my preliminary work. I compare what I expected to happen in my book to what actually happened. I often do an outline of the first draft so I can look for gaps and gaffes. After a read-through I'm ready to send the first draft to my beta readers. I need to send it away so that I can take a break and let the manuscript set before I plunge into revisions. . . assuming I have the time to do that. The downside of taking so long to get started is that one has less time if a deadline is looming.

But I can't do it any other way. I need to ponder and back track and stare at the wall for days and weeks and months before I can start. I need to edit as I go. I think it has much to do with personality. Spontaneity is not my middle name. But I do enjoy planning.

It seems to come down to now or later. Crawl along, cleaning up as you go and tidy up later. Or, plunge in, get a first draft and then do a major clean-up. No getting around it. However we do it, writing a decent book requires writing and revising. Now or later.

Why Writers Need Help

I, Donis, am currently fiddling and tweaking endlessly on my twenty-ninth draft. My books are only finished when they are finally in print and I can no longer get my hands on them. Like Barbara (see her excellent entry, below), I am also a micro self-editor. I want my manuscripts to be as good as I can make them before anyone, even my spouse, gets a look at them. The only problem with this, I find, is that after about the fifteenth draft, I completely lose any perspective I ever had and really have no idea if what I am writing is good or not. Did I make it better when I changed the word understood to comprehended? Is Character A any more convincing as a blond than he was as a redhead? Should the dog really have buried the spoon? Or should it have been the three-year-old who buried the dish. Maybe the three-year-old should have buried the dog and the dish run away with the spoon.

This is why presses have professional editors. There is no writer who does not benefit from judicious editing. Not Steven King, not Gillian Flynn, not Earnest Hemingway, not William Shakespeare. Once upon a time I saw a television interview with a Very Famous Author, several of whose books have been made into movies. This woman is big, I tell you. So big that at this point in her career, she has complete editorial control over her books. I know this because she told the interviewer, “I never let anybody edit my books.”

At the time I had just read her most recent book; a thousand-page tome that rambled around like the Mississippi River and was just as muddy. “Madam,” I said to the television, “you may wish to rethink that position.”

Practically every time I submit a manuscript, my editor points out some flaw in the story that seems so obvious to me that I slap myself on the forehead and slink away to stew in my own humiliation for a few hours. Why hadn’t I seen that gaping omission? In fact I probably created it myself when I removed an entire scene while I was working on draft number twenty.

I have never written a book that came out as well on paper as I envisioned it in my head. But once the book is published, if I put it aside for a year or two before I look at it again, I see it with new eyes. Considering how much I suffered when I wrote the dang thing, I’m amazed at how well it turned out.

Editing yourself, Part One

Barbara here. It's Wednesday morning, the sun is shining, the birds are singing, the grass is nearing the six inch mark, and the weeds are happily choking out every semblance of a real flower in my gardens. And I've got a book to work on. So I hope this is going to be a short post.

As usual, my Type M blogmates have provided the inspiration for today's thoughts, which are along the lines of NOW THAT I'VE WRITTEN THE SUCKER, HOW DO I MAKE MY BOOK BETTER?  From Vicki's tale about the man who accosted her at a book signing with his self-published book under his arm to Aline's story about the joys of rejection letters to John's listing of Chandler's ten commandments for the detective novel and Marco's experience on the editorial side of the table, these posts all address the hard work involved in transforming an incoherent, soggy first draft into the best book it can be.

Some authors, especially those at the beginning of their (often short) careers, think that first draft is the best it can be. Others, often mid-career authors, fiddle and tweak endlessly with the twenty-ninth draft, always finding one more thing they can improve. I know many authors, myself included, who edit their already published novels on the fly during public readings. Oh damn, that's a useless word, or That doesn't make sense like that! Most of the time, a book can be made even better with a little more tightening, a little more enrichment, a little more focus ...

It's a long road from the first draft to the final brilliant product, there is no roadmap, and there is no triumphant THE END sign at your destination. Usually it's a deadline. At the moment I am standing at the beginning of that journey, staring out across the field, and contemplating the long slog ahead. Being a pantser, I have written this novel without a clear plan or outline, exploring where it would go next and wondering whether it would ever come together to a proper end. Now it has, sort of, but I have about 90,000 words of plot holes, missing, inconsistent or irrelevant characters, characters who have morphed from good guy to bad guy, ragged timelines (Wait, it is still Tuesday? or my favourite OMG, it's Sunday, they won't be open/working.), and settings that are missing in action for entire scenes.

The first task is to fix all that, the best I can, by myself. Before another soul sees it. Critiquing groups, beta readers, editors, and agents can't see this mess; they wouldn't be able to see the gem at the centre of it all, let alone polish it to perfection, until I have done the best I can to fix it up. How, I ask? In this week's blog I will talk about this initial macro-self-editing process, and in my next post two weeks from now, I will talk about finer editing, "on screen" vs. "hard copy" editing, and the value of fresh eyes in the form of other readers.

Each writer has their own technique for rewrites, each with its merits, so I will just describe mine. I am from the pre-computer era, so much of my process is old-fashioned. I write my first draft longhand, producing a scribbled, scratched out jumble full of arrows and "insert here" notes all around the edges of the pages. When I can't remember where I was or have reached a stalemate in the story, I transcribe this material onto the computer in Word. I know there are writing software programs out there, but it took me long enough to figure out Word after being forced to relinquish the much more writer-friendly but now defunct WordPerfect, and I think all the whistles and prompts and sidebars of fancier software programs would crowd my brain. I don't like structure or rules; I just want to free-flow.

It's during this transcription process that the first rewrites occur. I add, subtract, enrich, and clarify the text on the fly. Plus, I open an additional Word file called "Notes on ..." and if the fix is too complicated or I can't think how to fix it, I note my ideas in this file, along with other plot or character ideas that I think of as I go along. In this fashion I chug through the first draft, forging ahead in longhand and then transcribing it and adding notes to my burgeoning file, so that by the time I reach the end of the book, the computer version is not too far behind and I have pages of notes waiting for me to address in future rewrites.

Once I reach the end, I finally know what the story is about, who did the crime(s) and how the story is resolved. So a lot of the huge plot holes and character problems are self-evident. Some of my concerns and potential solutions in my "Notes on ..." file are now irrelevant, but I read through them all, pick out the gems, refine them, and brainstorm new ideas on how to fix the book. The whole of the book needs to be in my head, along with the potential solutions, so that I can juggle and adjust it as a whole. One cannot do this initial macro-editing piecemeal; the book has to be worked on as a whole. This is a huge brain exercise that I'm hoping will go some ways to staving off Alzheimers. Plots and subplots and characters oh my!

Once I have this pile of notes, I start to read the novel on screen, incorporating as many of these adjustments, insertions and deletions as I can, as well as fixing the obvious typos and minor inconsistencies that jump out. Often at this point, to help my poor brain out, I write an outline with a word or two describing each scene, to help me see the flow. This often leads to further adjustments as the plot holes and problems leap out at me.

Once I have done this initial massaging to fix the major plot holes and character problems, I print the whole thing and begin a more intensive rewrite on hard copy. I'm still looking at the overall picture, adjusting characters and pacing, elaborating and clarifying, but the smaller details often jump out as I go along. I may go through several print versions as they become too messy to focus on.

At a certain point in these reprints, I will tackle the timeline, to ensure consistencies in time of day and day of week, setting, weather, etc. I will label the beginning of each scene with those details, and fix whatever problems I uncover. Sometimes this leads to interesting new twists, for example if I discover one day is forty hours long, so the action has to be split into two days, or has to take place in the dark, etc.

Besides plot holes and problems in character and timeline, tying up loose ends is another crucial part of the rewrites. I keep a special little note in my file of the things that need to be resolved or explained in the denouement. As much as possible, I try to integrate these into the story as it unfolds, so I don't end up with thirty pages of explanation at the end of the book.

In reality, there is no clear line between macro and micro-editing, but the key thing is to fix the bigger problems before working on the finer details. In my next blog, I will tackle the latter, and also the uses and abuses of beta readers. Meanwhile, I'd like to hear from other writers. what is your process, and do you have a writing or editing software program that really helps?

Why books are better than e-books in two cartoons

by Rick Blechta

There’s this:

And this:

I rest my case.

Criticism

WHAT THE EDITOR SAID

good idea well followed through we enjoyed
a great deal we read with pleasure and interest
there was much to take note of the bustle and
jar the excursion and homeward turn some
belters of poems got hold of my ears all well-
crafted precise rhyming we particularly liked
numbers three four and seven but

I heard this poem at a reading given by Hamish White and it made me laugh out loud.  Hamish is a well-known and very accomplished Scottish poet (who also reviews crime fiction) and he has  kindly given me permission to share it with you.

Do you recognise this too - the 'but...'?  I think it's what's known as the enthusiastic rejection: when you know that if they meant what they said in the first paragraph there's no way they wouldn't be publishing the book.  I think it's intended to be kind, but in the days when all I seemed to get were rejection letters ( wish I'd kept them to paper the downstairs loo) I used to skip the first paragraph and look for the one beginning with that 'but..'   It spared me the pain of hopes raised only to be dashed.

I wasn't very good at interpretation, though.  Just about the first story I sent to a magazine, while I was still at university, came back with a letter that pointed out what was wrong with it, and I was crushed.  I went wailing to my friends, 'They didn't want it!'  and it took me a long time to get up the courage to write another one.  If only one of my kindly and sympathetic friends had told me I was lucky because not being sent a form letter was real encouragement, and that I'd better learn, mark and inwardly digest every precious comment, I'd have started my professional career a lot sooner.

The difficulty when you're starting out is getting criticism from a reliable source.  With the best will in the world, your friends probably can't provide it; their responses are inevitably tailored by the relationship with you.  If they are too impressed, it doesn't help you, if they are too brutal it doesn't help the friendship.  After a very bitter experience, I decided to make it a rule not to critique other writers' work.

It was a steep learning curve, but I came round to understanding the value of brutal criticism.  It still smarts, particularly when it's justified, but I'm good about taking it now - as long as it's from my agent or my editor.  Between them, agents and editors have improved my writing beyond recognition and I'm grateful.

To this day, though, when my agent calls with comments and begins by telling me tactfully how much she loves what I'm doing, I don't listen.  I'm on the edge of my seat, waiting for the 'but...'  I'm always quite disconcerted if it doesn't come.

The other sort of criticism is the kind that comes in the form of reviews in newspapers or on Amazon and the like.  Of course the fun ones come from the highly intelligent, sensitive and discriminating readers who give you five stars and say, 'Even better than the last one.' You purr, but you don't learn from those.

At the other end of the spectrum are the ones who give you one star, and say they hated it from page one - clearly total dimwits.  Authors should be able to ban these people from ever reading another of their books.  Have you thought about that, Amazon, huh?

But there are the ones who come in the middle, who generally liked the book but thought there were one or two things that were wrong with it, and those reviews are invaluable.  There was the one, for instance, who pointed out a mannerism my lead character had that she found annoying; she was right, and I dropped it next time.  Someone else pointed out a theme that wasn't fully developed, and I took that one on board too.

The cruellest critic of all, though, is me.  I can always see something that wasn't quite what it should be, something that next time will have to be better.  It's uncomfortable, but I think if I ever wrote a book that was in my eyes perfect, I'd retire.

Hamish White's book 'Hannah, Are You Listening' is published by Happenstance.

A Second Hat to Wear

This past year I've had the opportunity to serve as editor on two short-fiction anthologies. In Blood Business, a noir crime/paranormal anthology from Hex Publishers, I am the assistant editor alongside the editor/publisher Josh Viola. For the 2016 RMFW Anthology, Found, to be published by the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers, I am the head cheese--the vato in charge of everything.

In both cases, serving as editor has been an instructive experience. For one, I'm on the other side of the editorial desk and it's enlightening to review manuscripts as they come to me. Hex invited writers with a track record in the genre and for the RMFW anthology, it was an open submission for members only. I got to see manuscripts arrive in various stages of preparation. Some read like first drafts and others were already quite polished, both in story-telling and craft.

Since the manuscripts that arrived for Blood Business came from established writers, I had my eyes opened a little more as to how challenging it is to write a good story. Mostly because we writers are always too close to our work. In our mind, we've tied together loose ends and the narrative flows in one logical current. Tightening the story shows the value of a good editor, and I hope I've been so. In my content editing, I had to be careful that I helped the writer hone the story and that I not rewrite it. Plus, many of the submitting writers have significant authorial credentials and now I'm in the lofty position of judging their work and suggesting changes, a humbling role. That concern is weighed against the publisher's desire to release a great book so Josh and I had to call them as we saw them.

My experience with the RMFW anthology has been more encompassing because I honcho the anthology from submissions through selection, editing, copyediting, cover and interior design, formatting for publication, publication as an ebook and a trade paperback, and marketing. Since we accepted open submissions, the editorial process heavily involved the R-word: rejection. We received 89 entries and I had to whittle that number down to fifteen. What helped--or hurt if you were on the submitting end--was that RMFW published strict formatting rules that I followed to the letter. That knocked 35 submissions out of the running, which was disappointing because that included stories from friends that I was looking forward to reading. The remaining 54 stories were doled out in a blind process to eleven volunteer readers, and we assigned a score to each: 0-pass; 1-maybe; 2-accept. Nine stories received a double 2 score. That meant we had to review the remaining to decide on enough stories to fill the anthology. Although I knew how subjective the process was going to be, I was still surprised how our opinions broke on many of the entries. In sending out the rejection notices, even then I had second doubts about which were the best and wished I could have included more, but I had to draw the line somewhere.

Found will be available this September, and Blood Business will hit the streets in 2017. Buy lots of copies of each and make this editor happy.

Maine Chance

My grandson graduated from Colby College last Sunday. It has an excellent reputation for academics and was easily the most peaceful campus I've visited.

All the visiting relations stayed in Belfast the night before. My daughter, Michele, and son-in-law, Harry and his mother, June Crockett were treated to a great tour of the town by Murray and Margot Carpenter.

Belfast was fascinating and the town was one little hilly street after another. That surprised me and in a very short time all the muscles in my legs rebelled. By the bay the terrain was relatively flat and I was intrigued with the commercial aspects of shipping and ship-building. Besides, standing still and asking questions is a sly way to distract attention from a pained expression. These were serious hills. In town, yet!

I didn't know a thing about Maine. I've never been a huge supporter of the "write what you know" idea, but when it comes to setting, I think it's essential. No amount of Googling would have substituted for the couple of days in Belfast.

Streets in Kansas are wide and broad and in Maine they were narrow and winding. One could not zip right along.

From Maine we went to Manteo, NC where my granddaughter will be married Sunday. The family has gone to NC a number of times and I'm a little more familiar with that state.

But still! The chances of getting nearly everything wrong are sky high when writing about an unfamiliar setting. You'll have the flamingos going "eek" instead of "awk" and the wrong kind of flowers blooming at the wrong time and the wrong kind of grocery store chains.

However, there is a way of working around some of this if the protagonist is not writing from the viewpoint of a native. Write as an outsider. I did this with a couple of short stories that had a trucking background.

The outsider viewpoint is very useful for inserting background information. For instance, in my mystery series, Lottie Albright has moved to Western Kansas from Eastern Kansas and she often compares the two halves of the state

There is nothing wrong with using any setting you choose if you are willing to do the work. Visits, historical societies, and leg work can take you a long ways. As for me, I still enjoy writing about my native state.

WHO NEEDS RULES?

“There are three rules for writing a novel," W. Somerset Maugham once quipped. “Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” Anyone who's set pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) knows this to be true. However, that's never stopped members of the literati from offering advice in the form of "rules" to writers of crime fiction.

In 1841, with the publication of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," Edgar Allan Poe launched the detective fiction genre and established what is known as "Poe's Five Rules of Detective Fiction":

1. There must be a crime, preferably murder, because it fascinates readers more than any other crime and there appears to be an unlimited number of ways in which people can die.

2. There must be a detective, someone with superior inductive and deductive reasoning, who is capable of solving the crime that baffles the official police system.

3. The police must be seen as either incompetent or as incapable of solving a certain type of complex crime.

4. The reader must be given all the information or "clues" to be able to solve the crime if the "clues" are properly interpreted.

5. The detective must explain who the criminal is and the motive, means, and opportunity by the conclusion of the story.

It's interesting to consider works of crime-fiction, past and present -- both literary and cinematic presentations -- and discover most honor Poe's list, give or take a rule or two. When we think of literary adages that have withstood the test of time, the final lines of Raymond Chandler's "The Simple Art of Murder" stands out: "...down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man." You know the passage. You've read it before. You've probably even recited it to someone. I would argue, though, that, given the state of the contemporary crime-fiction novel where sleuths are more diverse and complex than ever, Poe's rules are more relevant than Chandler's musings.

Following Poe, in 1928, S.S. Van Dine offered his "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories" in the American Magazine. His advice includes, "There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better" (rule 7) and compared the genre to "a sporting event." I can't imagine what Poe would have thought of Van Dine's flippant portrayal of the genre. Several decades later, as part of the New York Times "Writers on Writing" series in 2001, Elmore Leonard wrote "Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle," his own list of ten rules that any writer is smart to follow. Where Van Dine is didactic and antiquated, Leonard is helpful and offers gems for contemplation.

However, for the contemporary writer of crime fiction (and our modern-day readers), Raymond Chandler's "Ten Commandments For the Detective Novel" remain helpful, interesting, and like all of Chandler's work, sparse enough to offer writers room to maneuver within his list and readers leeway to argue for or against the merits of any contemporary favorite.

1. It must be credibly motivated, both as to the original situation and the dénouement.
2. It must be technically sound as to the methods of murder and detection.
3. It must be realistic in character, setting and atmosphere. It must be about real people in a real world.
4. It must have a sound story value apart from the mystery element: i.e., the investigation itself must be an adventure worth reading.
5. It must have enough essential simplicity to be explained easily when the time comes.
6. It must baffle a reasonably intelligent reader.
7. The solution must seem inevitable once revealed.
8. It must not try to do everything at once. If it is a puzzle story operating in a rather cool, reasonable atmosphere, it cannot also be a violent adventure or a passionate romance.
9. It must punish the criminal in one way or another, not necessarily by operation of the law....If the detective fails to resolve the consequences of the crime, the story is an unresolved chord and leaves irritation behind it.
10. It must be honest with the reader.

Like everything Chandler wrote, this list is direct, thoughtful, and provides excellent fodder, most of it pertaining to plot and authorial credibility. Which rules still hold up? Take the last novel you read and see. I'd argue most rules will apply. It's an interesting list to view as an author. Admittedly, I have sinned against some of Chandler's commandments in my own works, but I like to think of Robert B. Parker's Spenser series, which, novel after novel, seems to uphold these "commandments" with the dedication of Mother Teresa.

In the end, what are we to make of lists and rules? Some argue rules only hold a genre back, imposing unnecessary (and/or antiquated) limitations to what the genre can achieve. Parker, after all, insisted he didn't write genre fiction and listed The Great Gatsby as the greatest crime novel. I say that where excellent literary criticism has the power to make a text more accessible for a larger reader base, our genre's lists and rules challenge us (as readers and writers) to examine works more closely while asking our best authors to at once write within these boundaries -- and to also stretch them to new limits.

*Originally appeared in The Strand, May 5, 2016

Brain On Vacation

Apparently, my brain has gone on vacation. It’s pretty much been that way since I turned in my book to my editor. I can think of nothing to talk about today. Nada. Zilch. Zippo.

I’m sure my brain will return to its usual state once I receive the comments from my editor, but for now it’s happy watching TV and catching up on reading.

Here are a couple books I found particularly interesting, both historical mysteries.

From the Charred Remains by Susanna Calkins. This is the second book in the Lucy Campion series, set right after the Great Fire of London in 1666. The main character is a former maid in a magistrate’s household who has now become an apprentice to a printer.

Silent Remains by Christine Trent. This the second book in the Lady of Ashes series. I admit that what attracted them to me are the covers. The main character, Violet, is a female undertaker in Victorian England. Queen Victoria asks Violet to perform undertaking services for a peer who died after returning from Egypt. She also asks Violet to look into the death and to make sure the body stays unburied until the queen wishes services to be performed. Of course, no one refuses the queen!



 See you in a couple weeks after my brain has recovered.