Collision

This is one of those weeks when my day job (teaching) collides with my other job (writing). And the crash has me thinking about en media res and back-story, two things all writers contemplate and with which all writers at one time or another struggle.

I asked a group of students in my Crime Literature senior elective at Northfield Mount Hermon School, the boarding school where I live and work, to write a fictional account of Massachusetts’ oldest unsolved murder, one which has been well documented and just happened to take place on campus about 80 years ago. The story has long fascinated employees, students, and crime enthusiasts (if that phrase makes sense . . . can one be enthused by crime?).

The assignment called for students to research the case by reading four primary documents, attend a Q@A with the School’s archivist, then write a narrative that offers a plausible account of who did it and what took place, paying careful attention to motive, means, and opportunity.

Working with talented writers –– for whom this was their first step into the world of fiction –– reminded me how important beginning en media res is and how challenging it is to effectively incorporate the backstory.

Here’s my next assignment. It’s an activity I’ve had a lot of luck with, one that illustrates for beginning fiction writers a story arc and forces them to select a starting point somewhere on that arc and effectively deal with the backstory.

Give it a try. And if you do, shoot me a copy at jcorrigan1970@gmail.

What’s My Back-Story? A Plotline Activity

Must every story be told in a linear narrative style? No way. Readers want a scene that allows them to figure out the story on their own. So how do we tell stories cinematically? By using scenes to convey the storyline. This allows the writer to use flashback sequences while starting in the middle of the action and continuously pushing the story forward.

Read the following plotline and determine which numbers (there are several, after all) at which you could begin. How will you include the information that came before your starting point? Must you include all of it?

Write a first- or third-person opening scene (narration and dialogue) beginning at one point on the line and dropping in the necessary previous material as the scene moves forward.

1. Mary Howard grew up in Readfield, Maine, the daughter of a doctor. 
2. She went to UMaine at Orono, where she studied history, graduating with a 3.5 GPA, and met Steven Smith, a political science major, whom she married following graduation. 
3. After graduation and one year of marriage, Mary dutifully helps Steven launch his political career.
4. Mary, now in her mid-30s, helps Steven becomes a Maine State Legislator and raises their three kids.
5. Unbeknownst to Mary, Steven begins an affair with a fellow Maine State Legislator. 
6. Mary gets a phone call from an intern in Steven’s office, who tells her of the affair. 
7. Mary confronts Steven. This takes every ounce of courage she has. In 15 years of marriage, she has morphed from the confident, bubbly Mary Howard, to the housewife of powerful Maine State Legislator Steven Smith. As his career has taken off, her identity somehow got lost. 
8. Mary listens as Steven tells her the affair is just “a sideline” that “this is how some political marriages are.”
9. Mary packs her bags, grabs her kids (now ages 11, 9, and 7), and walks outside, determined to start a new life. 
10. She drives to Santa Fe, New Mexico, a place she’s only seen on TV. 
11. In Santa Fe, she enrolls the kids in school, gets a job in a bookstore, and hires attorney Phil Rogers, who is 35 and single.
12. Mary doesn’t know what to do when Rogers asks her to dinner six months after she’s been in Santa Fe and following what was a surprisingly easy out-of-court settlement with Steven. She wonders what message a date would send to her kids. Would her acceptance tell them that they are all starting over? That it’s okay to move on? Or would they think she’s callus? 

Googleganger and Dracula Sneeze

With less than a week to go before my deadline, I’m finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and it’s not an oncoming train!

On my breaks from writing, I’ve been watching lectures from the Great Courses. Nonfiction topics seem to clear my mind so, when I go back to work, I can more clearly see the story I'm writing.

I check the courses out from my local library through Hoopla. (It’s a great resource, by the way. See if your library subscribes to it. My own books are available through it, both in e-book and audio formats.)

The latest course I’ve been enjoying is “Secret Life of Words: English Words and Their Origins.” Anne Curzan is the lecturer. She’s a professor of English and Associate Dean of Humanities at the University of Michigan. She also is a member of the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel and co-host of That’s What They Say on Michigan Public Radio. She’s a great lecturer. I highly recommend it.

Secret Life of Words covers a number of topics including The Life of a Word, The Human Hands Behind Dictionaries, and Often versus “Offen”. There are 36 lectures total. I’ve only viewed a handful so far.

In the first lecture (Winning Words, Banished Words), Professor Curzan talked about how the American Dialect Society chooses its words of the year. It’s interesting enough, I thought I’d tell you about it.

The ADS conference meets every January and votes. Anyone who attends can take part in the discussion as well as vote. There’s an open floor for debate on the choices, ending in the participants raising their hands to vote on which word they believe should be the “word of the year” for the previous year.

The word of the year for 2018 was tender-age shelter. I admit I’ve never heard of this one. It refers to the government-run detention centers that have housed the children of asylum seekers at the U.S./Mexico border. That has been a bit of a preoccupation of the U.S. this last year so I can understand why it was selected.

In 2000, the ADS also voted on “Word of the Millennium”. The finalists were “the”, “she”, “government” and “science”. “She” won out. Here’s a few interesting things I learned about the pronoun. (1) No one’s sure of its origin, (2) The word is new to the millennium. It first appeared in a written document in 1154, and (3) It may reflect language contact with Old Norse.

There are several categories the ADS votes on besides “Word of the Year". One of the more interesting categories is "Most Creative".

Past winners of Most Creative Word have been:

Googleganger: when you google yourself, these are the people who come up that aren’t you

Dracula sneeze: a sneeze into your elbow

Recombobulation area: area after security at airports where you put shoes back on and basically put yourself together before heading to your gate

gate lice: airline passengers who crowd around a gate waiting to board

You can find all of the nominees and vote tallies for all of these words and more on the ADS website.

Scene blocking

by Rick Blechta

Something came up in the past few days with my novel-in-progress and I want to share a little trick I was taught years ago by a director of stage productions. I’d forgotten all about it since I normally don’t write action scenes with large numbers of characters doing critically important small movements. I’d sort of forgotten it in the intervening time.

The director had read the ms for one of my novels (When Hell Freezes Over) and our conversation started with something like, “You know, the climactic scene at the end made no sense to me. In fact, it was impossible the way you’ve written it.”

My response was probably something exceptionally erudite like, “Huh?”

“You need to block your scenes. It was obvious you didn’t do that. Your characters were in the wrong places to do the things they needed to do.”

As soon as I got back home, I ripped open the binder filled with my copy of the draft I’d shared with my friend, and found, damn it all, that he was completely correct.

The little trick Tom (my director/friend’s name) taught me was to write the characters’ names on little sheets of paper, draw a simple floor plan of the space where the scene is taking place on another sheet of paper and put the characters in position on the floor plan. If I wished to describe something in the room, a door or window or desk for instance, I should also add those to the floor plan if they’re fixed throughout the scene, and if they were to be moved (well, not windows and doors), then put them on a slip of paper too, so they could be moved.

“This is what probably every director does in some form or other when blocking a scene. Your memory is fallible. Don’t rely on it!”

So, back to the drawing board yesterday using Tom’s trick and I soon realized I was about to fall into the same trap I had back in the story on which he was reading and commenting.

I’ve now got a large sheet of paper, many slips of paper and I’m rewriting the scene, moving everyone around to make sure it’s all workable. A side benefit is that it really makes things come alive and several good ideas have been the result of that.

My only problem was that my wife used the table last night while I was out at a rehearsal. When I got home, everything was neatly piled on the desk in my studio.

Fortunately I had actually used my noodle for once and taken a photo of my blocking diagram with my mobile phone. Otherwise, I would be one frustrated author right now.

So thank you again to Tom (wherever you are).

To the rest of you, feel free to take advantage of my hard-won knowledge.

Our Fascination with Bad Guys and Evil

I enjoyed reading the latest blogs from Donis Casey and Frankie Y. Bailey about their take on their literary villains. When blocking out a story, I often fixate on the villain and then I wonder why. Why do we have such a fascination with bad guys and evil?

I reached out and asked a number of writer friends who their favorite villains are. Some of the answers were quite interesting: Randall Flag (from Stephen King’s The Stand), Tony Soprano, Jack the Ripper, Long John Silver, The Joker, Draco Malfoy, Maleficent, the Pied Piper of Hamelin (well, when he wasn’t paid for eradicating the plague ridden rats from town, he reciprocated by stealing all the town’s children), Hannibal Lecter, Nurse Ratched, and of course, Darth Vader.

Some answers drew more than a one word answer. “Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley. He could seem so normal as to be a sociopath. She really placed a light into that dark world. A villain…anti-villain.”

“Jack in Lord of the Flies. He is proof we are all base when stripped of rules, that hunger is what drives us all.”

“John Wilkes Booth…even though he killed Lincoln, he was a somewhat sympathetic character, a lost soul, pathetically delusional.”

When she mentioned John Wilkes Booth, it stopped me in my tracks for a moment. Booth thought what he was doing was the right thing. Don’t most villains rationalize their crimes as ‘doing what’s right’? Don’t they view their actions as beneficial for the greater good…even though their ‘greater good’ is criminal, repugnant, and destructive?

And the statement about Tom Ripley seeming so normal? The philosopher Hannah Arendt, while watching the Nazi engineer of genocide, Adolf Eichmann, stand trial in Jerusalem, realized that the most striking thing about evil was its banality. Eichmann looked like a bank clerk not a textbook villain. He was a bureaucrat who murdered millions of innocent people.

Ted Bundy, boyish, handsome, and charismatic, was a sadistic sociopath who confessed to thirty murders. But he looked so normal.

John Wayne Gacy tortured and murdered at least thirty-three teenage boys and young men. Before he was caught, he attended parades, children’s parties, and charitable fundraisers dressed as a clown. A CLOWN!!!! Okay, that’s pretty scary.

How many times have we heard the television interview with the neighbor of a serial killer who had been arrested say, “He seemed so normal”?

So back to why we’re so fascinated with evil.

Carl Jung believed we need to confront and understand our own hidden nature to grow as human beings. Healthy confrontation with our shadow selves can unearth new strengths, while unhealthy attempts at confrontation may involve dwelling on or unleashing the worst parts of ourselves.

Sigmund Freud viewed human nature as inherently antisocial, biologically driven by the undisciplined id’s pleasure principle to get what we want when we want it. We’re born to be bad but held back by society.

In the early 1970s, Stanford psychologist, Philip Zimbardo carried out his infamous Prison Experiment. The mock jail he created in Stanford’s psychology building where “guards” abused “prisoners”, revealed the speed with which ordinary people can begin to carry out depraved acts in a toxic environment.

I’m certainly no expert, but is it possible the reason why we’re fascinated with bad guys is that the line that we need to cross to get to the Dark Side is incredibly narrow?

Or is it that being good is boring and being bad is wicked fun?

The Ideas Factory

By Vicki Delany

Where do you get your ideas? That’s a question authors are always been asked, and in a lot of cases we can’t answer. Ideas just come.

Entering The Ideas Factory

But, right now, they are not coming to me.

I’ve written more thirty-five books. I’m currently writing four series , and publishing three novels (and some years one novella) from major traditional publishers each year.

And I’m running out of ideas.

Talking over an idea with a friend

There are some plot limitations in the cozy genre. The reason for the murder has to be personal, and it has to involve a close-knit community or group of friends. No international crime rings or random killers or threat of terrorism or organized crime. It has to be solvable by the amateur sleuth without the aid of reports from Interpol or forensic analysis. And, the amateur sleuth has to have a compelling reason to get involved.

So, as I’m running out of ideas, I went straight to the Ideas Factory.

Road to the Ideas Factory

Meaning my writers retreat.  Twice a year I get together with a small group of writers friends in some remote location, at which we write, talk about writing, take long walks, swim if seasonally-appropriate, and eat and drink well. (by a total coincidence Barbara wrote about her writers’ retreat this week: https://typem4murder.blogspot.com/2019/02/in-praise-of-writers-retreat.html).  It’s a time to recharge and – sometimes – get ideas and inspiration.

This year I didn’t do any writing while there, because I went with the aim of coming up with some plot lines. Over the three days, I talked with my writer friends on our long walks in the snowy woods, and over a glass of wine by the fireplace.  We threw out ideas, some pretty ridiculous, some mighty funny, I made lots of notes.  I got some good, concrete ideas that I intend to use.

At the Ideas Factory

The fifth in the Lighthouse Library series, Something Read Something Dead, comes out on March 13. I'm having a contest for an advance reading copy at my facebook page. If you'd like to enter: www.facebook.com/evagatesauthor OR leave a comment here at Type M.

About the Villain

I intended writing about something else today, but what Donis wrote about villains yesterday got me thinking.

I'm dealing with that issue of the villain right now as I work on my historical thriller. In my five Lizzie Stuart mysteries, only two of the villains die. On the other hand, in my two Hannah McCabe police procedurals, the villains both die. I didn't plan it that way, but that is what happened.

In the standalone I'm working on now, the villain is -- I hope -- a three-dimensional character with what he perceives as good reasons for his dastardly acts. That part works because I always try to understand my villain and give him/her a chance to make the case for what he or she does. But it is disconcerting in this thriller to have the reader know early on who the villain is and something about "why." This requires me to spend so much more time than I usually do inside my villain's head. He is not a serial killer. He is not insane. So I am dealing with someone who can rationalize what he does.  I don't agree with his logic, but I don't want to stack the deck against him by inserting my author's perspective.

I have to admit that I sometimes have empathy for villains. That could have something to do with the fact that I began to really think about villains when I was reading Shakespeare -- three quarters of Shakespeare in college. I found Iago fascinating. I thought Macbeth and his wife deserved what they got -- but they also had some great lines. Richard III had me from his first monologue.

I think the thing about villains is that they have so much energy. In one of my Lizzie Stuart books, the people who were behaving badly threatened to steal the show. Luckily, Lizzie is a first-person narrator. Even so, I had so much fun writing one of the characters that I'm already planning a return appearance.

One of the questions -- one that also comes up in other genres -- is whether the villain can redeem him/herself. If the villain feels justified and then later changes his or her mind and does the right thing, was he or she only a misguided protagonist? I'm playing with this idea. Maybe I will find it easier to stay in the head of the bad guy in my historical thriller if I think of him as both protagonist (from his POV) and antagonist (from my hero's POV).

Although it would certainly be time consuming since I have at least four viewpoint characters in this big book -- I'm thinking of writing the book with each of the main characters as the narrator. That would be four or five novellas. Then I could go back in and put them all together, with alternating narrators. I'm thinking of this because it would make it much easier to keep track of what my characters -- including my "villain" -- are each doing over the course of eight months. I would also be able to settle in and write from one POV from beginning to end.

It seems like a lot of work to take this approach, but I think it will save me time (less revising) and allow me to create characters who are more fully developed than they are when I'm simply shifting viewpoints as I write. For example, I will know what each character has been up to and how character arcs overlap and intertwine. My villain has a life. He doesn't spend 24 hours a day hatching ways to make my hero's life miserable. If I tell the entire story from his point of view, I hope I'll be able to really understand him.

Has anyone else taken this long way around when dealing with multiple viewpoints, including both hero and villain.

The Bad Guy

I’ve been working on my bad guy today.

Is it true that in a mystery novel the author has to keep the villain a secret until the end?  Not necessarily, because the villain isn’t always the killer, sometimes the villain is the victim. Witness Christie’s Murder On the Orient Express. When I write a mystery novel, I try to mix it up from book to book. Sometimes the bad guy is the killer, sometimes the victim, and sometimes the villain is just a red herring. Perhaps in a mystery novel, there doesn’t even have to be a villain, just a killer. A person can do an evil thing without necessarily being evil.

No matter what kind of book, though, you can’t beat a great villain. The touch of genius in The Dark Knight’s Joker was that no reason for his evil was ever really given.  The tale the Joker tells about himself keeps changing - is one version true or are they all lies?  His most revealing explanation is when he compares his lust for destruction to a dog chasing a car. He doesn’t want anything. He wouldn’t know what to do with the car if he caught it. He just wants to chase it.

One of my favorite literary villains for sheer scariness is  Andrew Carlisle in J.A. Jance’s Hour of the Hunter. He’s a genius as well as a complete psychopath, and you wonder how he’s ever going to get caught. The possibility that someone like him actually exists kept me awake for a night or two. If it can be thought of, it can be.

A brilliant movie villain, in my humble opinion, is Archie Cunningham, the character played by Tim Roth in Rob Roy. He is thoroughly despicable. He never once in the entire movie does a decent thing. He also spends a lot of time staring at a miniature of his mother, which he keeps in a locket around his neck. As for Archie’s father, well, his mother had narrowed his identity down to three possibilities. Maybe we can guess why Archie is like he is, and even spare him a little sympathy, but he’s such a pig that when he finally gets his comeuppance, it’s only what he deserves and we are entirely satisfied
.
That movie, by the way, has several really interesting themes. How far would you go to survive? Would you be able to hurt yourself to keep from being killed? Would it occur to you to climb inside a dead cow to save your life?

But I digress.
 
We were speaking of our favorite villains. Remember Snidely Whiplash? Now there’s a villain.

In praise of the writers' retreat

This is going to be a short post because I am far too busy with serious writing work to find time for it. Twice a year I get together with writer pals for a couple of days of synergistic renewal. In the summertime, we get together at my lakeside cottage and in the winter at Robin Harlick's cabin in the pristine woods of West Quebec. We are a core of close friends but not everyone can come every time, so this time we are just three.

We have been doing this for years, and I am a firm believer in the benefits. Writing is a solitary, indeed lonely, profession. Whether we are hunkered down in our garret or sitting in the local Starbucks, we are living in our own heads, talking to our imaginary characters and spinning our own tales. It can get very dark and claustrophobic in there. Getting together for a few days with fellow writers is restorative. We remember how to talk, to laugh, and to reach out in support.

Writers, particularly crime writers, have a unique way of looking at the world and it's a delight to spend time with like-minded individuals. We realize we are not crazy when we obsess about the best places to hide bodies or to cover up a murder. It's very affirming.

Besides helping our sanity and validating our view of the world, writers' retreats are occasions to get inspired, rekindle hope, and solve storyline impasses. Many a plot idea has been generated by the free-flowing, wine-fuelled brainstorming that accompanies the happy hour or the after dinner aperitifs.

The business side of writing is equally confounding, and writers' retreats provide a chance to rant, rave, and problem solve about the promotional side of writing. What works, what is a waste of time, and what does your publisher do about ...? It's also a great place to vent about the frustrations and challenges of this crazy-making business we have chosen. Moreover, the helpful insights and suggestions about the business and the craft of writing are always useful.

And finally, I don't want to understate the power of nature to bring peace and inspiration. Escaping from the clamour and distractions of the city and our busy lives allows us to spend a couple of days focussing on our writing and get on with the stories we want to tell.

All in all, writers' retreats revitalize the soul.

More thoughts on favourite months

by Rick Blechta

I found Aline’s post yesterday really interesting and it got me to cogitating.

If I had to pick a favourite month — or one that I find more interesting than the others — I think I’d have to nominate March. “March?” you say. “Dull month.”

Not so fast! I grew up just north of New York City and winter was pretty well done and dusted — to borrow a British term. Snowdrops were up and blooming under the saucer magnolia in the front yard. In the back yard our crocuses were doing their thing, and next door, their pussy willow tree was covered. (I’d sneak over and clip some when they weren’t looking, little scamp that I was.

That was my youth. Then I moved north to Canada during university and never went home. March in Toronto is certainly better than March in Montreal where I first lived, but it’s not as “friendly” as it was back home. We generally still have snow on the ground, certainly in the early part of the month and will experience some pretty cold temperatures. But the ground will have begun thawing and towards the end of the month, our crocuses and snowdrops will at least be poking their heads above the ground, harbingers of what will come in April — besides showers!

So from my youth I remember warm days, cool nights and the early plants blooming. In Toronto, my great joy is hearing melt water flowing. It can be in something as un-glamorous as a roadside catch basin, but hearing water moving means that winter’s grip is loosening and at long last there’s so much to be looking forward to just around the corner.

Let’s boil this down to the essence: March means hope to me — and I’m a hopeful person.

Out with it! What’s your favourite month?

January: the Case for the Defence

So that's January gone again to wherever it is that the lapsed months go once we've finished with them. It gets a bad press: Dry January, Veganuary, the sort of nicknames that suggest gloom, misery and depression, even if you're paying no attention to the recommendations for infliction of self-torture.

But I like January. December is such a frantic month, when you're not only shopping for presents, cooking for celebrations, cleaning the house, going to parties when your back is sore and the conversation is even more achingly boring, while the social smile is so fixed that it's actually hurting your ears, and you wake up at four in the morning wracked with guilt about the time you've spent away from your desk, with a deadline approaching.

I look forward to January 2nd. This year, with the way the dates fell, there were only three days before the weekend and in that blissful spell, nothing at all seemed to happen. I could even make peace with my professional conscience, knowing that the quiet weeks of January lay ahead, and had a proper break when I sat by the fire and read books that were the ones I wanted to read, not useful ones.

This is when I can really get my head down and get on with the next book. No one arranges book talks in January or crime festivals; social life dwindles away to almost nothing. What's not to like? I have time to work on a resolution or two to improve my working life – not too many, or it gets depressing all over again – and no one minds if you hibernate.

My study is my den – indeed, it's more than that. I'm like a hermit crab and it's my shell. If for some reason I have to move out of it – painters, cleaning, grandchildren visiting – I scuttle about feeling absolutely lost. I was interested in John's post about places we like to work; but I've almost got to the point where I can't imagine working anywhere else.

Perhaps I'm feeling even more indulgent towards January than usual since we have had so much perfect winter weather: windless, with clear, pale skies, crisp air, sunshine, a frost at night and an occasional icing-sugar sprinkle of snow but no more than that. I've been thinking about you all and hoping none of you have been too badly affected by the extreme snow and frost.

This year I was given a little tear-off desk calendar claiming to be 'The Wit and Wisdom of Women'. Judging by this women tend to think in cheesy cliches. However, as we move into February which I think is a much less appealing month – worse weather, more demands – I have decided that perhaps Lilly Pulitzer who contributed the thought for today could be right; 'Despite the forecast, live like it's spring.'

Crash Crash Boom Boom

I've led a charmed life. Not a single broken bone. No injuries other than a tiny stress fracture from using a treadmill. So I can only imagine what a serious injury would feel like.

However, like most fiction authors, I have a vivid imagination and from the minor aches and pains I have been exposed to I can sense what these ordeals must feel like.

There is something unrealistic to me about characters--usually the hero--in a book who has broken ribs and heaven only knows what else and can spring from his bed the next day in full pursuit of the evildoer. I don't think it makes sense.

Ditto, the unreality of someone who unplugs all the machines in a hospital room or pulls out IVs and sneaks away against medical advice. How fast can the human body recover from a grave injury or function without lifesaving devices?

Another turnoff to me is car chases in movies when vehicles careen from street to street getting and receiving endless damage and still, by George, manage to run. Not my little Subaru. It's as temperamental as all get out. And wouldn't these collisions jar? Produce headaches, at least? Double vision?

For that matter, why pursue someone who is going to beat you up? If you are hoping this person fleeing is going to lead you someone in danger that's one thing. High speed chases with no plausible outcome just for the thrill of the chase is another.

It's possible to set this up, but using a man with broken ribs who needs crutches and a blood transfusion doesn't cut it.

It would be interesting to hear about other situations that turn my fellow Type M'ers off. And I would love to hear from readers also. We all know about the TSTL (Too Stupid To Live) scenario when the heroine bypasses all regulations and is devoid of any common sense and confronts a serial killer all by her courageous little self.

Are there others?

The Elf on the Shelf

The office: messy but quiet

Thomas Kies’s interesting post “Writing Space” got me thinking about how space and ritual help us do whatever the hell it is that we do.

Last Sunday, my wife came downstairs at a little after 6 a.m., entered the kitchen for her first cup of coffee, and was startled to find me at the tiny kitchen table in the glow of my laptop.

“Why aren’t you in the office?” she asked.

I’d left the office a week earlier, finding the tiny kitchen table suitable for the pre-dawn hours. I’d begun the fall in the living room, in the leather chair, computer on my lap. (I’m writing this from the office once again.)

“I’m like the Elf on the Shelf,” I said and turned back to the glow of the computer screen. “I change locations all the time.”

She ignored me and left the kitchen.

For me, it’s not place as much as it is distractions –– or, rather, the avoidance of them. At 4 a.m., the house is quiet, and unless the stuff really hits the fan, so is the dorm to which my house is attached. I’m the lead dorm parent to 60 girls, ages 15-18. I don’t know everything, but I know the teenage species sleeps at four o’clock in the morning, so my 4 a.m. writing time almost guarantees peace and quiet.

And I need a ritual. It might be listening to the same playlist as I work on a book (Everclear and Third Eye Blind –– remember them? –– when I wrote Jack Austin novels; more like Coltrane for Peyton Cote). My coffeemaker is set to start brewing at 4:00.

Kitchen table

The first cup is ready at 4:03. I’m at the desk with my Yeti travel mug by 4:05. And if it’s a good morning, I can get a thousand words by 6, when I bring my wife her coffee.

Not superstition. Routine.

A routine that offers a way to help me, for lack of a better expression (and I apologize for the terrible sports cliche), enter The Zone. I love writing in airports. No place offers anonymity like an airport. The ability to know I won’t be disturbed is what I need in order to enter a mental space where I can work.

Leather living room chair

Isn’t that what we’re really talking about? Some people clean their desks in order to feel ready to write. I like to have my old copy of Strunk and White within arm’s reach. Most of us just need to figure out whatever it is that helps us to settle back into our story, re-enter that world, relocate that voice, and continue pushing the story up the next hill.

The Elf on the Shelf works in the dark. He’s got it figured out.

The End

When I was reading Rick’s post yesterday (“Permission to Fail”), I couldn’t help thinking how much he sounded like me. All except for the music part. While I enjoy listening to all kinds of music, don’t ask me to play an instrument or sing. I am not musically inclined!

Right now I’m finishing up my latest book. With less than a month left to go before my deadline, I’m in full-fledged panic mode. On the rare occasions I’m in a calm frame of mind, I know I can finish it on time. But a part of me wonders if it will be as good as I want it to be.

That’s where the perfectionist in me rears her ugly head. I keep telling myself all I can do is do the best work in the time I have, but I so want it to be perfect at every stage of the process. When it comes to writing, that’s just not possible and probably not even desirable. The mistakes you make along the way often teach you things that result in a better book in the long run. I have to learn to give myself permission to write ugly words or to have a story that isn’t quite together at all times.

I don't think most readers expect books to be perfect. I certainly don't. As long as it keeps me engaged, I'm happy.

What’s interesting about this is that when it comes to my painting life (I enjoy tole/decorative painting), I’m not that much of a perfectionist. There I’ve given myself permission to fail or to not be as good as I’d like to be. Some days I paint well, some days not. But I don’t stress about it. If only I could do the same in my writing life.

That’s all I have for today. Ghosts of Painting Past is beckoning to me. As the sign says "Keep Calm and Write On".

Permission to fail

by Rick Blechta

I’ve been in the perfectionist business for most of my life, that is, I’m a musician by training and natural inclination. The main goal in music, no matter what the genre, is to attempt to express yourself perfectly. Or at least it’s that way for any musician who is serious about the gig.

I’m not one of those players who agonizes over it. Do I disappoint myself? Nearly always. I don’t remember the last time I played something absolutely perfectly — in other words on every level, I could not have played something better. Was it as good as Mozart or Beethoven (or a myriad of other musical geniuses) could have done? Absolutely not! But it was the best that I could do within the limits of my talent.

So, every time I play anything, I have hopes that this might be a perfect rendition, even if it’s just a major scale. The main idea is to get as close as one can and certainly play something well enough so that only tiny flaws remain — the kind no one but me would notice. I can accomplish that on occasion.

I often wish I hadn’t, but I brought that mindset to writing. I want to be perfect. I try to be perfect and my editors and copy editors help in that quest. I micro-edit to the nth degree and the only way I would stop is because I’ve been given a carved-in-stone deadline. Almost as important to me as trying to achieve perfection is not missing a deadline. Again that was something pounded into me by my music teachers: Never be late to a gig or show up without everything you need, period!

So writing novels for me can be very stressful, especially at the end of the process. There’s not a single manuscript I’ve turned in that doesn’t have typos, bad word choices, little awkward bits that have somehow escaped scrutiny. We all know they’re there.

What is really depressing is when I read some of my deathless prose after a number of months have elapsed, when time has brought clarity. It usually happens when I have to do a reading and I’m looking for just the correct passage to share. I’ll read something and it just goes clang. My usual quip is to say, “Who snuck in there when I wasn’t looking and added that horrible sentence to my novel?” Sure, it gets a laugh (even if it’s just from me), but the truth is, I failed, and that bothers me.

I’ve been known to edit reading passages I’ve selected — sometimes on the fly — correcting those little things that bother me. Fortunately, I’ve never been faced with a person in the audience reading along with me in a copy of the book. I can imagine them saying, “Wait a minute! That’s not what’s written in my copy!”

The thing is I’ve finally become more comfortable with the inevitable failures. I’ve given myself permission to have missed things, made poor word choices, written some bad sentences. I have to remind myself sometimes that I’ve done this, but I’m getting better at remembering that. I’m not going to beat myself up for mistakes. I will regret them, yes, but I’ve learned to forgive myself.

Except when playing music.

Writing Space

Do you have your own designated writing space?  A place in the house where the creative juices flow?  A corner at Starbucks where your characters speak to you?  A seat on your back porch where scenes come to life?

I posted the question, “Do you have your own designated writing space?” on Facebook in the Fiction Writing Group.  Some of the answers I got were:

--Actually, I have a particular folding table and chair which I store when not writing.  For some reason the ritual of setting them up every time helps me get into the right mindset.  I set it up on the deck if it’s nice, in the office if not.

--I have a favorite spot at the library.

--Yup. We call it my “geek cave”. Where my various Star Trek, general Sci-fi paraphernalia reside.  It’s my sanctuary of sorts.

--Sorta, I do have a desk I'm supposed to use but it's got crap all over it.  Right now I write on the couch.

Some sent me photos of their work space.  Some pictures showed cozy corners of the house where the tops of their desks were neat and tidy.  Then there were others that were cluttered with papers, files, photos and books…like mine, as depicted above.

Some workplaces have given birth to some remarkable fiction.  J.K. Rowling was partial to writing in cafés and coffee houses in Edinburgh while single, on welfare, with her sleeping daughter at her side. Rowling said in an interview: “It’s no secret that the best place to write, in my opinion, is in a café. You don’t have to make your own coffee, you don’t have to feel like you’re in solitary confinement and if you have writer’s block, you can get up and walk to the next café while giving your batteries time to recharge and brain time to think.  The best writing café is crowded enough to allow you to blend in, but not too crowded that you have to share a table with someone else.”

Now, of course, her fame makes it impossible for Rowling to work in a coffeehouse so she works in a writing room in her garden.

Jodi Picoult writes in the finished attic office of her Hanover, NH home.  She said, “It’s clean and quiet and has everything at my fingertips—namely, the files full of research I’ve been doing, plus reference books and a quick Internet connection.  But it’s also just a staircase away from my family if anyone needs me.”

In his book On Writing Stephen King states, “For any writer, but for the beginning writer in particular, it’s wise to eliminate every possible distraction.”  He goes on to say that one of the most important parts of your writing space is the door. King claims that your room must have a door that you’re willing to shut and keep closed until you’ve reached your daily writing goal. It also tells people that you mean business. By closing the door, you’re saying to the world to stay out, that important stuff is going on behind it. He says the door not only serves to keep the world out, but it also serves to keep you in and focused, without having to look to see who may be passing by the entryway.


Here are a few examples of writers in their writing space.           



                                                   Agatha Christie                             

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

                                          Damon Runyon















All the examples above are far tidier than my work space.  But I'm comfortable there and I've produced two published novels (and one more to launch in July) within its confines.  And all on the same beat up laptop. So as long as it works for you, keep on writing.

When Writers Teach

Those who can, do; those who can't, teach.

I like to think that I can write and at the same time, I like to think that I can impart some of what I've learned about writing to others. Before I got published, I kept my thoughts about writing to myself, thinking that I needed publishing credentials, otherwise I'd be spouting yet another unlearned opinion. Once I did get published I strained hard against first-book-itis, meaning that hubris and know-everything attitude first-time authors get. Sadly, I did slip once or twice.

After I got published I sought opportunities to monetize what I'd learned, mainly through teaching. I asked about teaching at my alma mater, the University of Denver, and I was told that because I didn't have an English degree or a Creative Writing MFA, it was a no-go. Over the years I did speak about writing at conferences, mostly gratis, and earned a recurring instructor gig at Lighthouse Writers. Like many of you already know, teaching is its own discipline. Good writers do not necessarily make for good instructors.

Here's what I learned:

There are only so many classes that can be taught on any writing subject. The creative part is inventing a new, catchy name for a workshop that's already been taught a bzillion times. The Importance of World-building becomes Crucial Steps to Setting. In your syllabus it helps to swap out terms that mean the same thing. Goal, Conflict, and Plot Twist becomes Direction, Drama, and Narrative Pivot.

Don't talk too much. If you're on a panel, share the mic. If you're teaching a workshop, throw in writer prompts. Personally I hate them because I'm one of those writers who struggles to bang out a coherent sentence and I'm awed by those who can in a matter of minutes, craft a paragraph of jeweled prose. But other writers love the opportunity to share so indulge them.

Get off your high horse. Most of your students are really sharp and well-read. I've had several occasions where I mentioned something in class and one or two of my students would immediately look up a reference on the Internet, or as us old-timers call it: THE computer.

Very few writers live on royalties. Even if you score a YUGE publishing deal, the money is dribbled out as if every dollar was squeezed from the publisher's liver. The first year might leave you fat and happy, but the checks start to shrink and soon, if you've already ditched the day job, you start hunting for side work that leaves time for writing. Possibly the most steady and lucrative way of keeping you fed and off the street corner is by teaching. Thankfully, a couple of years ago Regis University asked me to join the faculty of their Mile High MFA Creative Writing program. In their stable of poets and literary types, all very accomplished, I'm their commercial-fiction writing guy. I work part-time, meaning I still need other means of income, which are mostly freelance gigs and the occasional check for a short story. I also sell a painting now and then. Yes, I know many out there are astounded that I'm not filthy rich. In my youth, I did make a deal with the devil, but the check bounced. Bastard.

So go forth and write, fellow ink-stained wretches.*

* to quote Kurt Vonnegut

Beginning

Donis here. How interesting that for the past few days my blogmates' entries have dealt with the terrors of beginning a new book. Several of us must be in sync with the same stars, because I am in the throes of beginning a new book myself. I have recently completed rewrites on the first novel in what I hope will be at least a trilogy and possibly a series. The new book is a spin-off of the Alafair Tucker Mysteries, and is called Lust For Vengeance, The Adventures of Bianca Dangereuse, Episode One. It stars Bianca LaBelle, silent movie star of the silver screen, and is set in Southern California during the Roaring Twenties. And, yes, Bianca has quite the connection to Alafair Tucker. Release date for the new book has been somewhat up in the air because of the publisher’s merger (see below), but last I heard, it should be out around November, 2019.

All my husband's health problems have been taken care of for the moment, and now that things have calmed down at home, I'm trying to begin work on the second Bianca Dangereuse book. Before I ever started this new trilogy, I had an idea of where I want it to end up. But as usual, when I actually begin writing I realize that I really am not sure how I'm going to get there. Beginning a new book is always painful for me. Without fail, I try to get started, I write a bunch of drivel, I write a scene or two that go nowhere, I fall into despair. I'll never be able to produce another readable book as long as I live! Oh, wait. I said that last time. And the time before that. Eventually a couple of those pointless scenes mysteriously come together and suddenly I can see a path through the woods. It's that old magic. All you have to do is keep writing drivel and have faith. Just keep going. Nothing good will ever happen if you don't.

By now, everyone who follows the goings on in the book world has heard the big news about my* publisher, Poisoned Pen Press, with whom I have been with since my first book came out in 2005. Poisoned Pen Press has become the mystery imprint for Sourcebooks. Sourcebooks has acquired the “majority” of the Poisoned Pen Press list—about 550 titles—which will include my own. Along with some additional Sourcebooks titles, these works will become the new Poisoned Pen Press imprint at Sourcebooks, which has expanded its publishing program to include the crime and mystery category. In addition, titles from Poisoned Pencil, PP’s young adult mystery imprint, will be transferred to Fire, Sourcebooks’ young adult imprint.

Poisoned Pen is a well respected, award-winning publisher, but Sourcebooks has a much larger distribution, so I am told that this should be a great boon to the authors and make our books that much easier to acquire. Let’s hope it is so.

On a happy note, I learned recently that my latest Alafair Tucker Mystery, Forty Dead Men, was named one of Barnes and Noble’s best Indie books of 2018.
___________
*Type M bloggers Tom Kies, Charlotte Hinger, and Vicki Delany also are or have been Poisoned Pen Press authors

For the sake of art

My current novel in progress has plunged me deep into unfamiliar territory. Literally. The prairies and badlands of Southern Alberta. I'm an eastern city girl born and raised in Montreal and living most my adult life in Ottawa. I spent childhood summers in the Quebec's Eastern Townships (Three Pines territory) and my recent summers at my lakeside cottage in rural eastern Ontario. I did suffer through a couple of years of grad school in Toronto, but that was before the city got interesting. I travel extensively, and have made a point of trying to go to the far corners of the earth, but that's different from knowing the soul of a place.

I wrote ten detective novels set in Ottawa, which I knew inside out, before deciding I wanted to explore farther afield. My choice of setting for my new Amanda Doucette series was very deliberate; I wanted to take the series across Canada and showcase the breadth and diversity of my magnificently complex country. Geographically, we go from craggy coastlines to vast inland lakes and forests to prairies and Rocky Mountains before reaching the Pacific. We go from the crowded, clamorous cities of southern Ontario to the windswept Arctic tundra of Nunavut. I wanted to bring readers along with me to visit all that.

It turns out to be a tall order. My novels are always deeply grounded in setting, which I try to capture vividly enough so the reader can see and feel it. Part of setting is the people, how they dress and talk, what they think and what they care about. I make a point of visiting the places and trying to do all the things Amanda would. Hence the winter camping in Quebec for The Trickster's Lullaby and the kayaking trip to Georgian Bay for Prisoners of Hope. Each book has given me lots of adventures, big and small, and it's been great fun as well as enlightening.

But in going west, I am starting to go farther from my roots and from the experiences that fashioned me. The Ancient Dead is set in Alberta, geographically and culturally a very different place. I have visited several times, most recently this past fall when I was specifically researching this book and trying to visit the exact locations and do the exact things Amanda would be doing. Now that I am back home writing the book, however, a thousand small questions keep cropping up. What time of the summer is the alfalfa crop harvested? What does the ICU at Foothills Medical Centre look like? How far north does the prairie rattlesnake extend? And what kind of curses would a farmer use? Writing each scene, I am either stopping to research the answers or putting in multiple question marks for a later time.

I do all this in the interests of authenticity, trust, and respect. Alberta readers will know if I get the alfalfa crop wrong. Calgarians will know I never set foot in the hospital there. Just as I hate it when cavalier writers get my home wrong, I don't want them turfing the book out because of a wrong note. If I have the audacity to venture into a place I don't know too well, I owe it to people to try my best to learn about it. As well, if readers know I got the small stuff wrong, how will they trust the truth of the bigger picture? Regional slang is particularly tricky. I've decided it's better not to use it than to use it wrong.

How on earth did we writers cope before the Internet? I wrote many books and short stories before the Internet was as rich and accessible as it is now, and I recall dragging home stacks of books from the library, making phone calls, and poring over maps and newspapers. I also remember just making stuff up. But the internet has put an extraordinary amount of detailed knowledge at our fingertips, and with that access has come an additional burden to try to get things right.

Bu the internet has its limits, especially when it comes to getting a feel for the culture. Reading local newspapers, biographical accounts, and blogs helps, but in the end I still have to make that extraordinary leap into my characters' heads and hope that, regardless of whether they grew up on the streets of Ottawa or on a ranch in Newell County, human concerns and desires – the stuff of crime fiction – are universal.

Is it just me…

by Rick Blechta

Lately I’ve been puzzling over why I enjoy reading some authors and not others. We all have our likes and dislikes, of course, but this goes beyond that.

If you’ve been reading my posts, you know I recently discovered the celebrated Italian crime fiction author Andrea Camilleri and how much I’m enjoying the series he writes featuring Inspector Montalbano. Being in the writing business, of course I’m analyzing what it is that I find so enjoyable about the novels. Steal from the best, I always say!

Montalbano is exceptionally bad-tempered at times, and normally that would bother me, possibly to the point of bailing out on the story, but I coast right on past that. I enjoy the setting as well but in thinking back, there’s hardly any description in these novels, certainly not enough to give me a good “mental snapshot” of where the action is happening, and normally that would bother me too. I've never been to Sicily and there are certainly a lot of other readers who haven’t been, either, so it really isn’t fair to us to leave this out. But I coast right on past that problem too.

So what is it?

Well, Camilleri does have description of a sort. In place of the usual things used to set a scene, Camilleri presents us with the detailed inner thoughts of his main character. In building suspense in the stories, the author can’t make us privy to everything Montalbano’s thinking plot solution-wise, but he reveals to readers what this intriguing police inspector thinks about those around him, the politics of Sicily, food, whatever. It made me realize that if we were also given more detailed description of each story’s physical surroundings, the novels would become totally bogged down.

But that still didn’t answer my question: What is it about these stories?

Last night as I turned off the light after an hour spent in Sicily, it dawned on me. Camilleri’s plots are engrossing, but they unfold at a very leisurely pace for the most part. In thinking back to one or two North American police procedural novels I’ve read recently — and didn’t enjoy all that much — I realized that the action in them was too relentless. They raced from one physical altercation to another. The authors’ also employed the “jump-cut” technique of current TV shows and movies. While that can make a plot really cook along, it also becomes tiring — at least to me.

In North America it seems it has to be all action, action, action. I’m finding that wearing. When I think back to the Maigret novels as an example, I realize that action at the pace Simenon writes is more enjoyable for me. Camilleri’s novels have a very similar pace (which I don’t think is accidental) but it just works so well in Sicily. North American-style action sequences would just not work as well.

How do you feel about pace in a crime fiction novel?

Double Time

John's recent post, In Medias Res, and Frankie's comment, caught my attention this week. It reminded me of the comment my agent made when I was struggling with my second book. 'Write a few chapters,' she said, 'and then tear up the first one.'

As John highlighted, plunging into the middle of the action is very good advice. But then, as Frankie said, you have the problem of flashbacks.

The book then has to have two parts – the one that explains the background to the subsequent action, and the action itself. Of course it's generally accepted that what has happened in the past is often an excuse, or perhaps even a reason, for what happens in the present: read any plea in mitigation after a guilty verdict in a criminal trial, when the defending lawyer produces details of the defendant's hard childhood with a sadistic father and a mother who's a lush in the hope that pity will influence the sentence.

I'm comfortable with that. But there seems to be a fashion at the moment for books actually to have two separate time scales, with two distinct sets of characters and two main protagonists instead of one. Often they feel like two entirely different stories, though the link will emerge in due course.

I could cope with that as well – in a logical order, not if the two are interleaved, apparently almost at random. I have no sooner got immersed in one than, whee! Off we go into the other for a chapter or two. Usually, too, there is one plot that's more interesting than second one that you have to wade through to reach the next installment.

Being told a story is one of the oldest, and earliest, of human addictions. I love to be caught up in the actions, in the developing characters, and when my story is broken off I feel like a child would feel,waiting to see what happens to Goldilocks when Mummy says, 'I'll just stop there.' For the same reason I'm not a great fan of short stories; I've invested my interest in these guys and then the door is shut in my face.

Sometimes I've felt so irritated that I've considered cheating and reading the first time section all the way through,ignoring the second and then going back, but I guess all that would do is sabotage the story completely.

Perhaps it's just envy. I find continuity difficult at the best of times and the thought of creating two parallel stories that are totally consistent would be beyond me. I've never thought I could manage to be a trick rider, with a foot of the back of each of a pair of galloping horses either.