Titles: How does an author choose them?

~ patyjag ~ 1 Comment

In case you couldn’t guess by the title of this post, I’m having trouble figuring out a title. Not for the book I’m writing but the next one in the series. Yes, when I know what the book is going to be about, I start trying different titles to see what fits the story and how to make it fit with the series.

I didn’t have any trouble with titles for my Shadra Higheagle series, they came from the story I was telling: Double Duplicity, Tarnished Remains, Deadly Aim, Murderous Secrets, Killer Descent, Reservation Revenge, Yuletide Slaying, Fatal Fall, Haunting Corpse, Artful Murder, Dangerous Dance, Homicide Hideaway, Toxic Trigger-point, Abstract Casualty, Capricious Demise, Vanishing Dream, Christmas Chaos.

As you can see, they were all two-word titles with some reference to murder or mystery.

Then I have the Gabriel Hawke novels. I wanted these to have animals in the title because he is a Fish and Wildlife State Trooper, and I wanted them to sound like the title of an Indigenous story. Murder of Ravens, Mouse Trail Ends, Rattlesnake Brother, Chattering Blue Jay, Fox Goes Hunting, Turkey’s Fiery Demise, Stolen Butterfly, Churlish Badger, Owl’s Silent Strike, Bear Stalker, Damning Firefly, Cougar’s Cache, Wolverine Instincts, Wolf Moon, Captured Hummingbird.

Sometimes it is hard to decide which animal to use in the title. Some stories have the animal in it, and some, I allude to the animal. Then, coming up with other words for the title can take a bit of time. As Heather said in her last post, finding the perfect word is sometimes a struggle.

When I began plotting the Spotted Pony Casino Mysteries, I decided to use gambling terms as the titles. Poker Face, House Edge, Double Down, The Squeeze, The Pinch, Down and Dirty, Crapshoot, Full House.

I have the list of gambling terms and when I decide the plot of the story, I go down the list and figure out which term best fits. Which makes coming up with a title much easier.

But now, I have the Cuddle Farm Mysteries, which I am trying to keep on the lighter side, more cozy than the Shandra Higheagle series. The first book’s title, Merry Merry Merry Murder, came from a Christmas song. As you can guess, the story was set during the Christmas holiday. This second book is set in a century-old opera house during the rehearsal of a local play. I’ve come up with the title, Monologued to Death. It shows there is a murder and with the cover of the old opera house I have been frequenting and Monologued, the reader should figure out the death happens in the opera house. It doesn’t have the same wording as the first book, but with the Cuddle Farm logo across the top, the same font in the titles, and a similar look, I’m hoping it will work to make them look like a series.

My problem? Book three is a bit darker than the first two. It has to be the third book to make the secondary plot work right. I’m struggling with the title of that book, because I don’t want it to be too dark, and all the titles I come up with have been overused as titles.

It has to do with an evil that has been lurking within a character for decades. And the body that is dug up and upsets the world of my main character. Here are what I have so far:

Fiendish Folly – feels like a cozy, but it also feels too cutesy for the storyline.

Wicked Ways – has about 8 other books with that title, and it sounds morel like a witch is involved.

Evil Never Sleeps – This one has been used many times.

The Water Knows – again it has been used multiple times.

Haunting Memory – Used a lot.

Hints of Evil – This one I like, but not sure it fits with the series feel.

Here is the gist of the book if you want to help me with some titles: A child’s body is found when the river that runs through Auburn is diverted to work on drainage culverts. The body turns out to be a boy. The brother of Viola. He had been missing for decades, last seen with his sister, Andi (my main character), and Nina( her sister). The older girls said he was taken by a man in a blue car. Andi doesn’t remember very much about the day because she was only 4 and Nina was 9, Viola 10, and her brother was 6.

A Drawback of Being a Writer by Heather Haven

~ Heather Haven ~ 5 Comments

Being a writer has a lot of perks. One of them is everyone around thinks of you as rather a wizard. There’s something magical about writing to those who don’t. And here you are, making up all this stuff that goes on for chapters and chapters. Then wham! You have a novel, complete sentences and all. Impressive stuff.

There is a drawback, however. Whatever we write, we try to do it to the best of our ability. That works fine for a novel, short story, eulogy, or speech about water rights. When it comes to how many quarts of milk we need or should we have spaghetti or fish for dinner, it’s another matter. Just how eloquent should you be on a grocery list? But we try. How we try. We can’t let our readers down, even if they are only the cats, who in my case, think I’m overrated, anyway.

Speaking of quarts of milk, that reminds me of the writer, Scott Turow. I remember him giving an interview years ago and telling a wonderful story. His wife asked him to write a note to the milkman about cancelling a future delivery. Remember when we had those? People who delivered one thing to your home at no extra monthly cost to you? Now, of course, there is Safeway, Nob Hill, and Walmart delivering the whole kit and kaboodle for a fee. From bathing suits to prescriptions to food.  One Stop Shopping without having to stop and shop. Sometimes the milk is warm, the eggs are cracked, and they’ve thrown in baby wipes which I didn’t order, but nobody’s perfect.

But I digress. Back to Scott Turow, his wife, and the milkman. After an hour, his wife appeared at Turow’s desk and seized the scratched-out paper he labored upon. She sat down and scribbled, hold the milk on Thursday. Thanks. Then she got up and taped it to the front door.

As Mr. Turow was speaking to a room full of writers, his story not only got a big guffaw, but a round of applause. Nobody knows better than we do how the search for the perfect word becomes all encompassing. And how long it takes to find that word matters not. We are writers and that’s our job.

I tell people repeatedly when I give a lecture or speak to a book club, that what we do isn’t smoke and mirrors. It’s like tennis. The more you practice, the better you get. Yes, you have to have a certain amount of talent, but what it really takes is hard work, tenacity, and joy.

Joy is a definite perk. No matter what’s going on in the world out there or in my world at home, when I sit down to write, I am taken to a place I want to be.

Hmmm. In a way, that is magical.

 I can’t read while I write

~ Nancy Lynn Jarvis ~ 5 Comments

Which is a shame because my to-be-read pile is growing every day, filled with intriguing titles, but I’m working on book seven in my PIP Inc. Mysteries series which means no reading until it’s finished. You might wonder why I can’t read when I write. I’m a very undisciplined writer so it’s not like I sit at my computer tapping away all day long. Why, then, can’t I read when I take a break from writing?

I consider my particular writing and reading impairment as the result of being a good realtor for almost twenty-five years. Realtors are taught to mimic clients talking speed, body language especially use of hands, emotions, and language as much as possible. Classes are taught in how to do those things. I dropped out after the first class because I’m a natural mime, always have been. That helped me as a real estate agent and probably has helped in other situations, too, but as a writer it’s a problem for me.

Many cozy mysteries are written in first person. I don’t do that. I write in third person. But if I’m reading a good cozy written in first person, I start to slip into that style of writing which makes a mess of the POV and my manuscript in progress.

There are other distractions, too. Dialogue is a potential problem. After fifty pages of another writer’s dialogue, my characters begin to mimic their phraseology and start to take on their use of language. Mime time again.

My storyline suffers when I read while writing. I do a short psychological profile and background history for most of my characters before they head for their places on my pages. I do use a timeline because I need to know who knew what when or I get lost having, for example, a clue about when a character who had taken her hearing aids out in a noisy restaurant, put them back in (critically important in What Lucy Heard, for example) and why her dinner companion didn’t know she had.

My outlines are a lot more flexible, though. Before starting a book, I know who the killer is, how and why the murder victim was killed, how the story will begin and how it will end, and have characters I want to introduce to move the story forward, but there’s a great deal of flexibility in how all those pieces come together. If I read while writing, the mimic in me invariably spots a clever plot twist in the work I’m reading and wants to incorporate it in what I’m writing, which as you can imagine, makes a mess of my plot. I do wonder if it’s just me or if other writers have the same problems?

Until my book is finished and off to the editor, I’m sorry Nicole, Vinnie, Mary, Robin, Valerie, Claire, Genevive, Richard, and Verlin. Your books will have to wait a bit longer to be read, but I do know how important reviews are so I promise to leave one as soon as I finish reading your book.  It’s the least I can do for keeping you waiting while I write.

My Plot Walks In

~ Janet Dawson ~ 6 Comments

I recently returned from a trip to Italy. I started in Naples on my own, then headed to Rome to join a Road Scholar tour that took me through Rome, Florence and Venice. I enjoyed art, architecture, the countryside, the history, the people, the street life—also the pasta and gelato.

As a writer, I am constantly on the lookout for story ideas. I was sure that my sojourn in Bella Italia would provide. Indeed, it did.

The tour included lectures by various experts who discussed everything from the Forum and the Colosseum in Rome, to the Duomo in Florence, and the Bridge of Sighs that spans a canal in Venice.

In the middle of one such lecture, my plot walked in, giving me that wonderful feeling. The feeling that says: That’s it! Here’s where I can hang my novel!

I’m not going to tell you what it is. I don’t discuss my ideas before I have a chance to develop them further. Suffice to say, it’s a good idea. An excellent excuse to take another trip to Italy.

Hmm, does one really need an excuse to go to Italy?

I write a historical mystery series featuring Jill McLeod, who is a Zephyrette, or train hostess, traveling on the old California Zephyr, a streamliner train that ran between the Bay Area from 1949 to 1970. For this series, my character walked in first. Once I learned about Zephyrettes, I had to write a mystery with one as a protagonist.

The plot of the third book walked in when I took an excursion on a private Pullman sleeper car similar to those found on the California Zephyr. In this case the car was attached to the rear of an Amtrak train and we were making a trip from Los Angeles to San Diego.

When we were parked in the station at San Diego, the rail car’s owner told the passengers a tale about another excursion. The passengers on that trip had commented that there was something odd happening in one of the sleeper. They were hearing voices and hearing bells rings. Maybe he had a ghost, we said.

That idea walked into my fertile mystery writer’s brain. Soon my fictional Zephyrette Jill was returning to her onboard compartment late at night when she encountered something she couldn’t explain. And that’s how I came to write The Ghost in Roomette Four.

I was planning a trip to Paris at the same time I was working on the Jeri Howard novel Witness to Evil. Well, if I was going to Paris, so was Jeri.

Why would an Oakland private investigator take a trip to Paris and wind up investigating a case? I could think of two reasons for Jeri’s trip to La Belle France:  because she is paid to do so, to retrieve something—or someone. Turns out the someone is the catalyst. Seventeen-year-old Darcy, a problem child if ever there was one, swiped Mom’s credit card and flew to Paris. Darcy’s parents hire Jeri to find her and bring her back.

Jeri thinks that these two people have more money than sense, but hey, a job’s a job. She flies to the City of Lights and searches for Darcy, interested in the teenager’s why as well as her whereabouts. I figured once I got to Paris, I would figure out what I needed for my plot.

I kept bumping up against the Holocaust.

On the Île de la Cité, tucked behind Notre Dame, is the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation. It’s a sobering place to visit, honoring the 200,000 French citizens deported to Nazi concentration camps during World War II.

Later during that visit, I wandered through the Marais, the historic district of Paris that includes portions of the Third and Fourth Arrondissements. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this district had a thriving Jewish community. I was looking for a museum. I didn’t find that particular museum. But I found something else—an exhibit about the deportation of the French Jews.

What stays with me all these years later are the posters that family members put up after the liberation, searching for news of family members who disappeared during the war.

How does that figure into the plot of Witness to Evil? Read the book and find out.

The Truth, The Lie, and The Cozy by Heather Haven

~ Heather Haven ~ 7 Comments

My name is Heather Haven; I am 28 years old, and weigh 123 pounds. The first statement was true. If you saw me in person, you would know immediately the last two statements were a bald-faced lie. But that’s okay. I am allowed to lie. I write fiction.

 As a writer of fiction, I get away with making stuff up. In fact, it’s encouraged. I can lie like a rug covered in cat hairs. And do. Of course, at one time I was 28 and weighed 123, so I did ‘ground’ myself in the truth. Or did I ‘grind’ the truth?

In the happy world of fiction, the truth is not all it’s cracked up to be, anyway. I mean if it was, would fiction be so prevalent? Would it be so clamored for? Would Agatha Christie’s book sales be second only to the Bible?

As we know, fiction shines a light on the truth. Fiction writers get rid of the flotsam and jetsam floating in a sea of facts, obscuring real issues. As for me, I also try to throw in a few laughs along the way.

All my books are grounded in truth. They have to be. When I started writing the 9th book of the Alvarez Family Murder Mysteries, The Drop-Dead Temple of Doom, I did eight months of research before I could write a word. It was a crash course in the ancient Mayans, the jungles of Guatemala, and the worlds of orchids and coffee. Not only did the book win a prestigious award, but most importantly, several archeologists wrote to tell me how spot on the information included inside was.

The award, frankly, was just the icing on the cake. There are wonderful books out there that never receive any accolade whatsoever. But if you’re in the right place at the right time and get lucky, it can happen.

The real reward for research and banging on the keyboard for months and months, was hearing from people who lived the life I wrote about. They were appreciative I’d gotten things right, that I didn’t confuse the reader with misinformation. While I didn’t overload the story with facts, when I did relay something, I tried to keep it real.

Being a fiction writer can often be like walking a tightrope, But I come from a circus background, my parents being performers at Ringling Brothers Circus back in its heyday.

Whoops! Did I just give a clue as to my real age? Well, rats.