Month: July 2018

The First Sentence

~ kshughart47 ~ 3 Comments

Shughart,Karen-0016_ADJ_5x7 (1)I’ve spent my professional career writing, sometimes as a newspaper columnist and feature writer; other times where I contributed to or edited professional journals, brochures, quality of life books and newsletters. I also wrote two books of non-fiction.

I knew that every good piece of writing starts with a good lead, that the first sentence or two can entice readers to read more. But when I started to write my first work of fiction, Murder in the Museum: An Edmund DeCleryk Mystery, I forgot what I knew. The first several drafts weren’t bad, but something was amiss. Then one day it hit me. I had written a prologue, but the first sentences were boring. Truth be told, the prologue was boring. I reminded myself I knew what to do, took time to rethink it, and started from scratch, happy at last with the results.

I belong to a book group. At the beginning of the year we choose the books we’d like to read, and then each person commits to leading the discussion at least once during the year.  The book we discussed for June was the National Book award-winner Sing Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward, a book of such depth and lyricism that when we discussed it, many of us did so with tears in our eyes. Ann, our discussion leader, asked how the first sentence related to one of the book’s themes, death, and to the title. The book is narrated by a young boy who says, straight out, “I like to think I know what death is. I like to think that it’s something I could look at straight.” Succinct and enticing, wouldn’t you agree?

When I got home from that meeting I started thinking about first sentences and the impact they can have on the reader. Consider, for example, Charles Dickens’ first lines in A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness….” How prophetic, those lines.

Then there is A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. This classic coming of age novel is set during the first two decades of the twentieth century and begins, “Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York. Especially in the summer of 1912. Somber, as a word, was better.”  If you’ve read the book, you’ll understand the context.

Perhaps you’ve read books by James Lee Burke, of contemporary southern crime fiction fame. His novel, Jolie Blon’s Bounce, starts out, “Growing up during the 1940s in New Iberia, down on the Gulf Coast, I never doubted how the world worked.” Powerful words, these, if you know the story.

So, as I knew all along, first sentences matter. They set the scene for what’s to come. And I’ll remember that when I start book two in the Edmund DeCleryk series.

The Fig Tree, Yoga, and the Middle of the Book

~ Amber Foxx ~ 6 Comments

At first glance, the fig tree in the courtyard outside my apartment looks like a round mound of large green leaves and tiny green fruits. Today, I studied it longer, though, and began to see golden-brown fruit hidden in the green. The longer my mind was attuned to shape and color of a ripe fig, the more of them I discovered. Circling the tree slowly, I reached in and harvested the fruit, choosing only the figs that were perfectly ready. My four neighbors in our building had come out into the courtyard, and I enjoyed the sight of my cupped hands offering the bounty and my neighbors’ hands one by one taking their share. Chatting sociably, we ate sun-warmed, rain-watered figs.

Later, as I began my yoga practice, I chose the theme of doing it differently. Normally, I practice without music, so I selected a CD from the bottom of the stack, strange contemplative music with drones and drums that I hadn’t listened to since I moved over a year ago. I started with a pranayama technique I seldom practice, changed the sequencing of familiar poses, and replaced others with asanas I’d neglected for a while. The idea was to change the flow of my energy and open myself to new possibilities.

I did it as preparation for writing, getting ready to tackle the middle . According to my word count, I’ve completed fifty percent of book seven in my series. The chapter in progress will be a major pivot point, with revelations about the crime and about a ghost. It should set up future challenges for Mae Martin, adding to the necessity of a trip to a place she’d rather not go—her old home town. The problem is, it feels like the beginning of Act Two, and it should be the middle of it.

I’m not cutting until I finish the first draft, though. As a pantser, I don’t yet know which of the subplots in the first half will turn out to be integral to the story and which can be removed. Several of them surprised me, but then, my ongoing characters have lives of their own. I’ve never suffered for lack of material. This is where my notes on possible directions and loose ends come in. I get floods of ideas and record them in case I forget, but as the book progresses, some of those ideas may not fit. Some of the loose ends will turn out to be dead ends I can cut. At this point, I look at that list and see a lot of major events yet to come, a lot of little green figs, but that may not mean the book is going to be too long. The pace should be picking up. I might really be half-way through. When this draft is done and I can step back and study it after a break, I’ll be able to see the subplots that contribute to the whole, like ripe figs hidden in the leaves.

I may have to rearrange events, the way I did my yoga practice. Perhaps that pivot point in the middle would make a good beginning or a good chapter three. Maybe it’ll be the beginning of Act Three. Revisions like that would be hard but satisfying. In fact, if it’s difficult, it may be more fun than if it was easy.

And I have an end goal. Not just a story, but readers. I won’t see them the way I saw my neighbor’s hands taking figs from mine, but creating a new book leads to the same joy: sharing.

Wowee, Zowee! July Has Been Busy

~ marilynm ~ 5 Comments

So busy, I’m late once again.

The life of this author has been jam-packed. So jam-packed I have not been able to finish the book I’ve been working on. Not all bad, because I had other writing jobs to do that actually pay money.

New covers for my earlier books in my Deputy Tempe Crabtree series have come in for my approval and I’m delighted. They are wonderful.

Wingbeat. New.jpg

And my favorite:

Intervention New.jpg

Though I’ve missed two of my regular writers meetings this month, I did get to go to the fabulous Public Safety Writers Association conference in Las Vegas, and it was the best ever.

We had lots of fantastic presentations from the best self-editing guide I’ve ever heard, first hand accounts of gun fights, lots of information on poisons of all kinds, plus other writing topics.

The most moving of all, though, was a first-hand account from a firefighter/EMT who’d gone to the outdoor concert next to Mandalay Bay with a group of friends. His brother was wounded, and after getting him out of harm’s way and on his way to the hospital, he remained in the parking area doing triage, giving medical help, and sending those who could be saved off to a hospital. The details were heart-wrenching.

Someone asked him how he knew what to do. He said, “All my training kicked in.” That’s something to remember as we write about first-responders.

I’ve copies of my newly edited and with new covers of the first four books in my Rocky Bluff P.D. series too. I am ready for my next in-person event which comes up in August.

Final Respects NEW

My personal life has been busy too—doc visits for hubby, regular household chores, a birthday party for a great-grand, some nice dinners out, and just living.

What about you? What’s happening in your life?

Marilyn

 

 

WHO’S TELLING THE STORY?

~ casojka123 ~ 4 Comments

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One of the first things you must decide when you set out to write a novel or short story is: who is the narrator? There are lots of decisions to be made. Is it first person or close third person or even second person? Nineteenth century novels were most likely to be told by an omniscient narrator who isn’t a character in the story but an observer.  THE MAN OF PROPERTY, the first novel in THE FORSYTE SAGA by John Galsworthy, begins, “Those privileged to be present at a family festival of the Forsytes have seen that charming and instructive sight—an upper middle-class family in full plumage. But whosoever of these favoured persons has possessed the gift of psychological analysis (a talent without monetary value . . . ” No one would write like that today.

Now the narrator is often a character in the novel.  Once you’ve decided on the narrator, you must decide who he or she is, where they fit into the story, if they do, and what person to use. THE SYMPATHIZER by Viet Thanh Nguyen begins with the sentence, “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces,” and it is clear that this story is going to be told in the first person by someone who is very much a part of it.

On the other hand, DEAD EYE by Mark Greaney begins, “Leland Babbitt shot through the doors of the Hay-Adams Hotel and ran down the steps to the street like he had someplace to be.” The reader’s first thought is that this is written in third person and that it’s going to tell the activities of Leland Babbitt. But when the next paragraph begins, “The chauffeur hadn’t been expecting his passenger . . . ,” you immediately realize that the reader is going to have an overview of the activities of several people and that the story is going to be told from a third person omniscient point of view.

Once you’ve decided who is going to narrate, you have to decide where the narrator fits into the story. If the narrator is a character, does the story action happen to him or her, as in THE SYMPATHIZER?  Or is the narrator an observer, one who watches the novel’s characters and tells the story as an outsider, as in DEAD EYE.

I remember once going to a luncheon where a young woman talked about a novel she had written that had interested an agent. She had written the novel in close third person, but the agent thought she should change it to first person. She was at the moment deep into that process and not really happy about it. She was having difficulty telling the story in first person when it had originally been conceived in third person. Changing the voice of the narrator was really stressing the writer out, because many things, not just the voice, had to change as she did the rewrite.

The important thing about narrative voice is of course how that person fits into the story. I often think of W. Somerset Maugham who wrote several novels in the first person narrative voice of someone not involved in the action. The narrator learns the story and tells it to the reader. Certainly that distances the reader from having an emotional stake in the action. We cannot experience the joy or the terror of the characters because we are being told the story at a remove. I often wondered why he did this, but THE MOON AND SIXPENCE and THE RAZOR’S EDGE were very popular in their day.

There are many different kinds of narrators in novels and short stories. Alice Sebold’s narrator in THE LOVELY BONES is already dead when the novel begins, although she watches the action and manages to save her little sister. In “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” Flannery O’Connor kills off her first person narrator just before the end of the story. I remember thinking as I was reading, “Well, the woman must survive,” but she doesn’t, and O’Connor carries it off.

The book I am currently reading, A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW,” by Amor Towles begins “At half past six on the twenty-first of June 1922, when Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov was escorted through the gates of the Kremlin onto Red Square, it was glorious and cool.” I learned a lot about time and setting from that, but I didn’t know anything about the Count except that he was an aristocrat at a time when that was not popular. The book begins almost like THE MAN OF PROPERTY, but the revelation of the Count’s character throughout the book is one of its delights. It becomes an entirely different book from a nineteenth century novel.

I find it difficult to provide a description of the narrator of my stories. Sue Grafton neatly solved that problem by having Kinsey Milhone tell the reader the background of the story she is about to tell including who she is, why she’s involved, and what her life circumstances are. These include a physical description of her.  As a result, we have a picture of Kinsey in our minds almost from the first page of the story.

The old trick of having the narrator look in the mirror is definitely just that—an old trick. I’ve finally settled on doing the description in bits and pieces: I have a picture in my mind of what Andi Battaglia looks like, but I’m afraid I’ve never conveyed this completely to my readers.

How about other writers? Who do you use as your narrative voice? How do you describe him or her? Do you like to write in third person or first? Do you have a preference when you read?

The Research Monster – or – Down the Rabbit Hole

~ janispattersonmysteries ~ 8 Comments

by Janis Susan May/Janis Patterson

Hello, my name is Janis Susan and I am a research geek.

I have always believed that historical accuracy in our fiction is of paramount importance – equal to that of a good story, in fact, and the further back in time we go the more important it becomes. Why? Because it is sad but true that a lot of readers get most of their knowledge of history through fiction and as writers we have the responsibility to make sure that the history in our books is as correct as we can make it. And by correct, I mean as it really was, warts, unpopular language and beliefs, politically incorrect (according to current standards) behavior and all. A lot of what happened in the past is unacceptable in today’s climate, but that doesn’t matter… it’s the past! As someone said, they do things differently there.

There are those who say that close adherence to history doesn’t matter, that only the story is important. I say that’s dishonest and lazy. It’s just as easy – as if writing anything were easy – to make a story historically accurate as it is to slap something together and call it historical. If an author is going to disregard history then he/she should at least be honest and call it alternative fiction.

I remember a mystery I read a couple of years ago that sent my blood pressure soaring. It wasn’t a bad story – the characters were fleshed out, the clues were there, the descriptions of physical objects and places were fairly good (if a little on the loose side, but hey – if they weren’t enough to set a history geek like me screaming, they were pretty much okay) and the mystery itself was involving and well-resolved. What sent me over the edge was that while the storyline was acceptable, the main characters dashed impossibly quickly back and forth over the Atlantic to Europe chasing clues. You see, the story was set in the mid-1920s, and transatlantic air passenger flights didn’t begin until 1938-1939 (depending on the parameters of different research sites) so there is no way the characters in this book could have zipped back and forth across the Atlantic – after all, Lindbergh didn’t make his history-making solo transatlantic flight until 1927.

The first sort-of-real transatlantic flight was indeed made in May, 1919, in a seaplane called the NC4. However, because it had no reliable navigation equipment, the plane would fly at night shooting their position from the stars. Then in the day, they would land on the water and sleep, and take off again when the stars came out. They were also followed by a Navy warship of some kind in case they crashed. As a side note, I have seen this plane in the Naval Aviation Museum (fascinating – do go if you can!) in Pensacola. It is huge! I mean, really really huge, so big you can’t get a picture of the entire thing in one shot. It is also so incredibly flimsy that I marvel any man would risk his life by flying in it.

Back to the discrepancies in this book – the first passenger transatlantic flights were Zeppelins, flying from Germany to New York, and they took four days. Commercial heavier-than-air transatlantic flight didn’t begin until 1938-1939 (again depending on the parameters of different research sites) so there is no way the characters in this book could have gone back and forth across the Atlantic in mere hours like they were on some modern jet.

See what I mean? Looking up one little fact like the date commercial transatlantic flights began and off I go down the rabbit hole of research.

Another example – some time ago I was judging a Regency romance contest. One of the entries was okay – fairly decent writing, good-ish story… nothing to rave about, but okay. Until the hero reached into the pocket of his Bath-cloth coat and pulled out a fountain pen to sign something. Wow! Talk about hitting a wall! FYI – fountain pens were not invented until 1827, when a very primitive one using a goose-quill nib was patented in France, or if you prefer, the modern steel-nibbed version which was patented in 1884. (See – I’ve spent the last 20 minutes or so reading about the history of fountain pens – never knew they could be so fascinating!) In either case, though, there is no way our Regency hero could have used one!

I gave the book the average scores it deserved on plot, writing, etc., but in the ‘anything else’ category I gave her a zero on period accuracy (I would have given her a minus score, but there was no way to do it) and explained why in a kindly tone. Wow! I got a letter back from her so hot that the flaming pixels almost burned through the screen, demanding to know why I had marked her down for ‘such a little thing.’ “After all,” she screeched, “it’s an old-fashioned pen – who will know the difference?” Ticked, I replied back “Anyone with a brain and the slightest knowledge of history.”

It is unfortunate that far too many readers learn about history from our books instead of academic sources and for that reason alone we need to be as accurate as possible. There are eras about which we have to extrapolate from scant knowledge – the Ice Age, for example, or third century sub-Saharan Africa – but in most historical ages (especially the popular ones like Ancient Egypt or Regency England or medieval Europe) there are lots of research materials to choose from and explore. It is part of our responsibility as writers to do so. Again, far too many readers get a great deal of their knowledge of history from fiction, and we can and should never forget that those who do not remember history – good, bad and indifferent – are condemned to repeat it.