Unwrapping a Book: Super Structure Analysis of The Shaman Sings

December 24, 2015December 23, 2015 ~ Amber Foxx ~ 1 Comment

I hope you’re having a lovely Christmas Eve and that you’ll find some books in your stocking. My turn on this blog comes up on the fourth Thursday of every month, which makes me the Thanksgiving and Christmas person. I debated doing a holiday-themed post, since I didn’t do one on Thanksgiving, but I have one on my other blog, a free holiday short story I did as part of a B.R.A.G. Medallion authors’ blog hop. And over the holidays I have more time to read and write, as perhaps you do too, so I chose this time to thoroughly unwrap a favorite book’s structure. If you’re in the mood for something seasonal, here’s a link to the holiday story: https://amberfoxxmysteries.wordpress.com/2015/12/18/indiebrag-christmas-blog-hop-a-free-holiday-short-story)

If you’re in the mood to think about the craft of writing a mystery, keep going.

In previous posts on this blog, I’ve reviewed James Scott Bell’s writing guide, Super Structure, and shared why I love the mystical mysteries of James D. Doss. To teach myself to better apply Bell’s structural signposts, I reread Doss’s first book, analyzing how he used those story-line elements in his unconventional way, long before Bell wrote the book. (FYI: I worked hard to avoid plot spoilers while doing this analysis.)

Bell’s first signpost—The Initial Disturbance

This has to be the rock that starts the landslide of the rest of the plot. It can be a pebble or a boulder, but it shifts the status quo in the world of the protagonist, requiring change and action in response. In the first chapter of The Shaman Sings, the disturbance is the arrival of a coyote near Daisy Perika’s isolated trailer home at the mouth of the Canyon of the Spirits. This book is immediately set up to be deeply mystical and yet also funny. In a few pages of conflict between an old shaman and a spirit coyote—and her own thoughts, her inner conflict—it’s not obvious what the impact of the animal’s message will be, but the feeling is strong: there will be one.

Doss delivers the same disturbance—a premonition of evil—in the point pf view of an Anglo newcomer to the region, police chief Scott Parris, the second lead character. The disturbance comes around a third time in the point of view of a nameless stalker observing physics graduate student in a laboratory at night, a nameless stalker who understands what she’s doing scientifically, and who hears a Voice.

Doss inserts the second sign post—The Care Package—into these scenes. Daisy gives coffee and companionship to the eccentric shepherd Nahum Yaciti who comes to visit, and to share his premonitions. Scott recalls his last premonition was before his wife died. We see him as a man who has loved deeply and lost. We see Daisy as a difficult person but capable of friendship. And we see the student as vulnerable, alone in her endeavors.

Third signpost—Trouble Brewing

This explodes with the murder and then is doled out steadily. It accelerates when the readers knows the cops are after the wrong suspect and that there are three possible candidates for the real killer.

Fourth signpost—The Argument against Transformation:

Scott moved from Chicago to start life over after his wife died. He wants to get away from death and violence. In Chicago he saw enough of that without working homicide, a job he avoided. He hates looking at dead bodies. He’d thought a small college town would be a safe and peaceful escape, but now he has a murder investigation on his hands. Daisy doesn’t want to answer the spirit world’s call. She is old and tired. But the threat of darkness is demanding her attention.

Fifth and sixth signposts—The Kick in the Shins and the Doorway of No Return:

These are hard to pin down, because the book shifts points of view at every turn, even though it’s essentially an interweaving of Scott’s story and Daisy’s story. Scott’s new girlfriend, an investigative reporter following the same crime, plays a major role. A setback that strikes her could be seen as both the “kick in the shins” for all concerned and a doorway of no return for her and for Scott. This event is blended with a reminder of the otherworldly forces at work. Deciding to share her knowledge with the police is Daisy’s doorway of no return. This is also part of the next signpost. (In Doss’s two-protagonist structure, the essential pieces of the story that Bell identifies are all there, but the pacing and placement vary from Bell’s recommendations.)

Seventh signpost—The Mirror Moment:

Scott and Daisy both have visions of the victim that deliver puzzling clues about her. These come to him in dreams and to her in a shamanic journey. When she meets Scott, something extraordinary happens between them at the level of spiritual consciousness. Neither of them can deny the power of what they know and the need to act on it. The argument against transformation has been won by transformation. She has accepted the continuing burden of her gift. Scott is committed to not only solving murder, but accepting that powers he never believed in might help.

Eight signpost—Pet the Dog:

Scott’s mix of patience and impatience with his inept officers, Slocum and Knox, is the closest I can come to identifying a “pet the dog” moment. Slocum’s ongoing incompetence sets many parts of the plot motion, so Scott’s tolerance of this particular cop is a key weakness, and yet a trait that makes the reader identify with him (at least the reader who would find it hard to fire a well-meaning but bumbling subordinate) and that’s the purpose of Bell’s “pet the dog” scene.

The last signposts—Mounting Forces, Lights Out, the Q factor, and the Final Battle

By this point in the book— the part which Bell in Super Structure describes as being like a raft going over a waterfall—I couldn’t slow my reading down even though I’d read the book before. To avoid spoilers I’m making this part of the analysis brief and skipping the mounting forces. Doss integrates the police work and Daisy’s mystical powers into a stunning final battle. He sets up his “Q Factor” at the outset—that thing which the lead can pull out and use to survive and keep going against all odds during the “lights out” moment. Scott, as a dedicated cop, of course has the motivation and the resources. Without the very beginning of the book, this perfect ending that blends both leads’ storylines wouldn’t work. What makes the finale succeed is that Daisy, as a shaman, also has motivation and resources.

A few more words of review:

The complex plot and colorful characters make this page-turning read. Doss never wastes a character. Why have a boring person as the code expert when he could have an eccentric old British hermit, a retired mathematician who is having an affair with young librarian? Why have just any cop mess up a few times when it could be one like Piggy Slocum? And Daisy Perika is no stereotypical Indian wise woman. The Wild West moment between Officer Knox and Julio Pacheco is classic Doss comedy and drama. The way he uses point of view shifts and humor in a thrilling mystery is unusual, but he pulls it off and never misses a step on the path of building a story.

A note to new readers discovering Doss:

This book is now labeled as the first Charlie Moon mystery. When you find Charlie to be a minor character, it may be puzzling, but at the time Doss wrote the first few books, they were called Shaman Mysteries. Then the author found that the shaman’s nephew, a Ute tribal policeman, was taking over, and he followed his characters’ wishes. The series became the Charlie Moon Mysteries, with his aunt Daisy’s shamanism still part of the stories, and with Scott Parris becoming a close friend as well as collaborating in investigations.

Signposts on the Way through a Novel: A Review of Super Structure

November 26, 2015November 25, 2015 ~ Amber Foxx ~ 2 Comments

Happy Thanksgiving. I’m grateful for many things, and most recently for finding the right book at the right time. I just finished the first draft of the fifth Mae Martin mystery, and this book on writing is helping me with revisions. My review:

Super Structure is a sequel, following up on the principles in James Scott Bell’s 2004 Plot and Structure. The new book quickly reviews the basic ideas of the earlier one but doesn’t replace it. I strongly recommend reading Plot and Structure first, to fully explore Bell’s LOCK system (Lead, Objective, Confrontation, and Knockout) and then build on it with Super Structure.

He has a chatty, casual style and gives his methods and signposts catchy names so a writer is likely to think of them easily without having the book open at her side. The way he words things seems light, but the value of his ideas isn’t. The Mirror Moment is great example. He analyzed successful books and movies and found that almost exactly at the midpoint of the stories, there’s a moment when the lead literally or figuratively confronts himself in the mirror and either thinks about his life, his integrity, his mortality, his choices and his dangers. It’s often short, but it’s deep. This moment is what Jack Bickham in Scene and Structure calls a “sequel.” Inner work that processes what’s gone before and leads to what’s coming next. The protagonist is facing that a threat, and the mirror moment defines not only the turning point of the story but the nature of the conflict in Act III—an inner battle or a physical one.

This book is so short it’s more like a booklet—117 pages in paperback. It’s cheaper as an e-book, but I like my reference books on paper so I can keep them beside me and flip to the section I need for a reminder why I’m stuck and guidance on how to get unstuck.

In both Plot and Structure and Super Structure—especially the latter—Bell wastes a few pages (20 out of 117) selling the reader on the need for structure, which struck me as preaching to the converted, since I had already bought a book about structure. Even so, I don’t regret investing in this slender volume. I’ve read Plot and Structure twice and was heading into a third reading when fellow writers recommended this new book. It was exactly what the plot doctor ordered: a synopsis of the earlier book to refresh my mind and some additional solid steps I can take to strengthen the tension and pace of my work in progress.

Bell is a bit biased against pantsers and admits it, but he still gives them some good pointers. As a half-plotter half-pantser, I like his brainstorming methods. The “mind map” reminds of one of my favorite big-picture plot tools, the mandala method in Jill Jepson’s Writing as a Spiritual Path. Bell encourages improvisation and free flow in playing with ideas for initial disturbances and possible outcomes of the events partway through a book. As he says when he’s trying to sell to the imaginary anti-structure person, structure doesn’t stop creativity. It gives it form.

Metamorphic Rock

October 22, 2015 ~ Amber Foxx ~ 7 Comments

Metamorphic rock results from the transformation of pre-existing rock which is subjected to high heat and pressure, causing structural and chemical changes. Marble, a stone often used for sculpture, is metamorphic rock.

There’s no such thing as a pure first draft in my world. Unless I’m writing very short fiction, less than 2,000 words, I don’t begin at the beginning with an outline or a seat-of the pants inspirational process and work straight through to the end.

I’d like to be a pure “pantser” but I have dysgraphia, the equivalent of dyslexia on the output end. Almost every word I type comes out with the letters scrambled. Even the spacing gets disordered. (I gave this disability to one of my characters and used it to provide a clue in Snake Face.) When I’m on a roll, I produce material that stumps spell-check, so I have to go back every few paragraphs and clean up promptly while the intended meaning of my gibberish is fresh in my mind. As I correct the typos, I can’t help noticing word choices, sentence structure and dialog that need revision. I’m what’s been called a “write-it-or.” Result: polished scenes that sometimes need to be cut from the story. Rather than delete them completely, I save them in various files for recycling.

Writing is artistic. It’s also geologic. I’m not only carving a final product from the block of stone that is my work in progress, I’m forming that rock myself.

Parts of it are sandstone, sedimentary rock layered gradually into place over years of collecting these scenes I didn’t use, as well as characters, settings, and ideas for murder-less mysteries. Other parts of the rock are igneous intrusions, hot surges of molten inspiration erupting from my creative source, the hidden place like the deep core of the earth. The metamorphosis occurs when heat from this process contacts the surrounding rock or when there are tectonic shifts or other sources of high pressure. Books and classes and blogs on the craft of writing apply some of that pressure.

Finding the essence of the story, I carve the stone I’ve built up. Critique partners help me reshape it. And then I cut, cut and cut some more. Sometimes I need to add material—back to forming the rock–and then sculpt again.

Life of a Saleswoman

September 24, 2015 ~ Amber Foxx ~ 6 Comments

I was the Girl Scout who sold the fewest cookies. When my school asked students to sell Christmas cards for its building fund, I knocked on all of two doors. I could dance, act or speak in public without a flutter of stage fright, but facing a neighbor at her front door and telling her I was selling something filled me with dread. I was sure I was bothering her.

Needless to say, as a young adult, I planned my career in performing arts, not sales. Then I moved to Virginia to be with a boyfriend and we broke up. There I was, with a degree in theatre and dance and no money to move again. I passed the state insurance exam and went to work for a company that sold supplemental disability policies for auto accidents. The job sounded stable and professional. I had no idea what I’d gotten into.

My boss assigned me to ride around out in the country to hamlets like Frog Level, being trained in door-to-door sales by a huge mustachioed man in a plaid suit. I wish I could use his real name, it was so funny—I’ll call him Don Duck, though. It’s close enough. He drove under the speed limit, his big belly up to the wheel, serene as a smiling Buddha, teaching me the Dharma of Selling. “Ask for the sale.” “Agree with their objections. You’ll break down those objections, but do it so they don’t notice.” “Get them to agree with you.” People would pass him on those two-lane roads, giving him the finger for his slowness, and he’d say cheerfully, “Must be in some kind of hurry.”

He seemed happy. Our boss, though, was tense and smarmy, proud of the twists and turns he could take to avoid paying when people got hurt. (“Did you walk to your mailbox to get your check?” “Yes.” “Great, glad you’re feeling better. That’s your last check.”) When a policy had to pay out, he would grumble, “Don never should have sold those people.” If I found selling those cards and cookies hard, imagine how tough it was for me to knock on doors for a manager like that. I quit.

My next job was with a lingerie company as a model and salesperson, part-time with no benefits. We did fashion shows of elegant nightgowns—and also teddies and corsets-with-garters and thigh-high hose. Nothing showed that wouldn’t show in a bathing suit, but the setting had a whole different mood than a beach: hotel bars. I learned to twirl on my toe while shedding a sheer peignoir down my back to reveal the teddy, looking over my shoulder, the peignoir hanging from one finger—hokey, but I was an actor and it was a role I could play. Mingling with the audience to pitch the products after the shows, I was great at shooting the breeze, making jokes that were just risqué enough while still being a lady, channeling Mae West into my far from West-like form. My boss said I could, in her words, “sell ice cubes to Eskimos.” Not true. I could sell lingerie in a bar while wearing it.

One of the customers at a show thought I had such sales skill he offered me a job with his office supply company. I needed benefits, so I took it. This was before online ordering, back when sales reps and middlemen were the norm. Discouraging is an understatement—I was driving around gritty industrial neighborhoods with my catalog of office supplies trying to get office managers to place orders with us when I knew full well our company had nothing to offer that was better than our competitors. Hello. Our product line is limited and our service is slower and more expensive. Please buy from us. I couldn’t sell those ice cubes anymore, and I could see where I’d be headed once I was off probation and on commission.

I thought my selling days were over when I got a theater job and worked for ten years as actor and choreographer. Then, in one of my periodic self-reinventions, I went back to college and got two more degrees and my various fitness certifications, and eventually opened my own yoga and personal training studio. What was I thinking? I had to market it.

It started off well. Word of mouth was good, and I gave away some great T-shirts. (This was in a small North Carolina town, so they said “Down Om Yoga” on the back.) People are funny about fitness and stress management, though. When they get stressed out and need it the most, they stop. I forgot the Dharma of Sales and didn’t ask them to commit, though it would have been good for their health as well as my bottom line. I agreed with their objections and stopped there. It was a sad day when I closed my studio. A friend in Norfolk tried to reassure me that I’d done the best I could in that location, saying, “If you’d had a truck wash and gun-cleaning service along with the yoga, you’d still be in business.” But I couldn’t help thinking that if I’d been a better salesperson, I could have kept the place alive.

As a college professor, I don’t have to sell my yoga classes anymore. I don’t have to market anything. My selling days could finally be over. But no—I’m a writer. Unless an author is with one of the big publishing houses and has a publicist who does the shameless commerce for her, she has to be her own marketing department. Except for my peculiar genius for selling sexy nighties in a bar, I haven’t been a stellar saleswoman in the past. Why is this so hard? I need to get back in the car with Don Duck …

“Agree with their objections.” He eases off the gas, taking a curve past a bait shop and gas station. “They say they never heard of you? Yep. It’s true. They’re in for a good surprise, though, and they can brag about discovering you. What else do they say?” Don grins and loosens his tie. “They’re afraid they might not like it. Lordy. I know the feeling. I read a book I didn’t like once, and it gave me a headache. I read some I thought I wouldn’t like, though, and man, they won me over—kept me reading all night. I especially like those e-books that only cost me as much as a latté. I kick myself when I spend that much on a fancy cup of coffee, but not a book. I get into a book and my wife keeps saying say, ‘Don, turn off the light,’ and I say, ‘One more chapter,’ and it’s two more, three more … I never had a damned latté keep me up that long. Coffee wore off in a few hours. A good book—that’s forever. And I liked some of those characters better than my wife.” He glances my way, popping a mint in his mouth. “You got that? Agree with their objections. But then meet them and ask for the sale.”

I shrink into my seat. “Oh, Don, I’m sure you’re right … But I can’t. I’d be bothering people.”

“What’s the matter with you? You’ve won awards, you’ve got good reviews …” He sighs, shaking his head. “If you won’t get out there and sell your books, you’ll just have to give ’em away.”

Ah. That, I can do.

Blog follower giveaway:

Two blog readers will win all four books in the Mae Martin Series in paperback. Here’s how to enter:

You don’t have long—just a few days—so do it now. Send an e-mail to ambfoxx@yahoo.com with the heading Blog Follower. Let me know which blog or blogs you follow (I have four*), and I’ll enter you in the give-away. I will reply confirming your entry. You can ask to subscribe to my new release mailing list at the same time if you want, but I will not automatically subscribe you. Fear no spam. It’s not coming.

On Monday Sept. 28^th at 12:00 noon Eastern time, I’ll close the entries and put all the names in a virtual hat and have a colleague pull two out. I will contact the winners and ask for their mailing addresses, and contact the other entrants with only the first name and last initial and general location of the winners, no personal information, i.e. “Winners are Jane X in Saskatchewan and John Y in Florida.”

If you’re not familiar with my fiction, you can read the book descriptions on https://amberfoxxmysteries.wordpress.com and also try a free sample:

https://amberfoxxmysteries.wordpress.com/free-downloads-retail-links

*The four blogs are:

https://amberfoxxmysteries.wordpress.com a blog about the mysteries of life and reviews of mysteries set in New Mexico.

https://everywhereindies.wordpress.com a blog dedicated to supporting and reviewing the work of indie authors who publish everywhere, not just Amazon. (It started as my Nook book shopping list and grew.)

http://ladiesofmystery.com a group blog with seven other women who write mysteries.

http://amberf.booklikes.com a book review blog covering everything I read, from yoga philosophy to cozy mysteries to literary fiction to thrillers and more.

Mystical Mysteries

August 27, 2015 ~ Amber Foxx ~ 3 Comments

Mystical Mysteries

If I could channel the spirit of any author to mentor me, it would be the late James D. Doss of Los Alamos, New Mexico. I discovered him through a review in New Mexico Magazine and read all seventeen of his Charlie Moon mysteries, some of them more than once, and I know I’ll read the whole series again. Though I don’t attempt to write like Doss—no one else could—he influenced me greatly as a writer of unconventional and mystical mysteries, where the ordinary and the spiritual meet.

Here’s a short list of the things I love about Doss’s books:

Characters. Complex and eccentric, they surprise the reader. I love the ongoing characters and the unique, colorful people introduced in each of the books. My favorite one-book character is six-year-old Butter Flye in The Night Visitor. Doss wrote child characters with unsentimental realism. Butter is tough and strange and yet likeable, and I have never laughed louder or longer reading any book, let alone a mystery, than I did when I read the encounter between Charlie’s irascible aunt, the shaman Daisy Perika, and Butter in the back seat of a truck.
Spirituality. The visionary experiences that Daisy and her ward Sarah Frank have are written in a way that makes me feel as if I’ve taken the shaman’s journey with them. The spirit world is integrated seamlessly with earthy realism and humor that says Doss understood this aspect of Indian culture: the sacred and the comic are not opposite or incompatible. He mixed Catholic mysticism into the books as well with beauty and sensitivity, another Southwest truth. Many people adhere to both Native religions and Catholicism at the same time. My favorite character for expressing that unique blend of spiritual worldviews is Nahum Yacitii, the old Ute shepherd who apparently ascended to heaven in a windstorm and comes back to visit the few who can see him.
Language. I read a Doss book and I am in the place. When he takes us for walk in the Canyon of the Spirits with Daisy, I hear every step and smell and feel the air. Even the description of the nervous, jerky second hand of a ticking clock is a marvel of observation that sets the mood of a scene perfectly. (I leave you to find this treasure, also in The Night Visitor.)
Mastery of the omniscient narrator. Most writers can’t pull this off, but Doss could show the thoughts of every character in a scene without causing the slightest confusion or disorientation in the reader, often to humorous effect. He could even use the point of view of an animal—a bird, a deer, or a prairie dog—as the only witness to an event, and make it work.
Hanging out with the guys. Doss wrote real, not hyper-masculine, male characters. Charlie often fails to understand the women around him, but he does it so sincerely I like him for it. The friendship and repartee between Charlie and Scott give me a sense of hanging out with the guys in a way a woman doesn’t often get a chance to in real life, even when some of her best friends are men.
Humor. I get a kick out tall tales Charlie Moon tells just for the fun of it, pulling people’s legs. While the essence of each book is serious, dealing with life and death and love, there is a layer of humor as well, coming from the genuine interactions between characters and from their various eccentricities. Daisy is a spiritual visionary and also a quirky, cranky old lady.

Doss resolved the tangles of Charlie’s love life finally in the last book. I wonder if there were more books in his mind when he left this world, though. Daisy was the oldest living member of the Southern Ute tribe, and Sarah Frank, a young adult by the end of the series, was trained—somewhat—as Daisy’s shaman’s apprentice. Was Sarah destined to inherit all the spirits in the canyon, and the ancient little spirit-man living in a badger hole, the pitukupf? I’ll never know. It’s the sign of a good series, though—I still think about it. The characters live on.

This is revised from a tribute to Doss originally posted on http://amberfoxxmysteries.wordpress.com.