Once a week I volunteer at a thrift shop whose income supports a social service agency in my small city and surrounding towns. The shop is wildly successful, with young people doing just about everything—taking in donations, pricing them, designing the sales floors (and changing the design and layout regularly), and holding sales when customers sweep in and come close to cleaning the place out. We are famous for our quality and variety and prices. My job is to put things out on the floor—to hang up clothes in appropriate sections and distribute items among the various divisions such as apparel, house wares, kitchen, home decor, crafts.

I’ve never worked retail before so this is a new experience for me. Just keeping up with the broad range of customers is a challenge. One person will examine an LL Bean jacket with attention to the seams and pockets, and another will pull out a T-shirt and frown at the color but throw it into their cart without further consideration. Sometimes the floor under a rack is littered with tops that refuse to stay on the hangers (thanks to the poor style of the designer), and I spend half my time rehanging things.

Items for housewares are lots of fun because I get to rearrange parts of a table to fit in something. I’ve never considered myself artistic in the design area but I surprise myself sometimes. When I return half an hour later to add to the cluster of knickknacks the one I put out is already gone. Confused, thinking I’m in the wrong spot, I spend a few seconds looking for it until I recognize that this is Bootstraps and few items last very long. Things are snatched up sometimes while I’m still appraising the location I’ve chosen for it.

But the best part are the people. Like most writers, I live in my head. I research for the current WIP, then disappear to that desk piled high with notes and books and a dictionary, hiding out from the world. Even when I’m out doing errands, I’m still in my WIP and the people I pass in the grocery store or on the street don’t hold my attention. But that’s not true at the thrift shop. This is where I learn what I’ve missed in real life, where I find the tiny fillips that bring a character to life.

A well-dressed man with a younger couple, male and female and physically smaller, are inspecting a jacket still on its hanger. I hear a little sound, like a foot scraping on the floor, though barely that loud, and keep walking past them. Another sound like a grunt and I turn to see the larger man looking at me. I ask if he needs help. He nods. Apparently both sounds were acceptable parts of conversation in his world and expected to get my attention, but I failed to respond appropriately. Communication reduced to its essentials.

Then there’s the woman who pulls a T-shirt off the rack and studies it as she follows me around the store until she finally asks if there are any more like it. I have no idea because I have no idea where she got it: from the $6 and $8 racks or the Boutique, or the Fresh Fits, which are a step below Boutique but above the discount racks. I go to work to track it down.

Another favorite is the petite woman in jeans, sweater, and sneakers who leans over the glass counter for the jewelry display studying each piece, her hands pressing on her thighs, until she gets really interested and rests her arm on the glass and peers down. She asks to see two pieces—a bracelet and a ring, which I pull out for her. She pulls out a loupe and studies the ring, then carefully replaces it on the glass counter. She handles the bracelet, turning it over in her fingers, holding it up, peering at it. “I found a nice bracelet here last month and sold it on eBay for $80. Sort of like this one.” Considering our pricing for most of the jewelry, she probably made about $60. She’s one of many who have found the thrift shop a lucrative source of income. Sometimes the managers even help them find something that might be rewarding.

Of course there is always the man or woman who wants the microwave, which works, for less than the $25 price tag, and decides she can do better elsewhere. Someone wants forks, but we don’t have any this week. They go fast. Spoons, no, knives, no. Forks, yes. Few people want all the glass we get, even though some of it is exceptionally fine. It eventually goes out onto the sidewalk in a cardboard box as a freebie, where it’s picked over but not taken.

Some people I see every week, and they pick through the new items in the carriage I’m pushing from table to table. The sign on the carriage asks them not to shop from the carriage, but we know how effective such signage is.

Once in a while I’ll spot a new volunteer walking around with a few items in her hands muttering I don’t know where to put this. I told one, “Put it anywhere. When I come in again, I’ll put it where I think it belongs.” A smile. Done.

Any place that puts human nature, personality quirks and all, on display is “home” to a writer. I’m typing this on Monday. This afternoon I head off to my “other home.”

When I write I have a set of practices that have evolved over the years, habits that are so automatic that I don’t really think about them. I just follow them. One of the simplest ones is beginning with a blank sheet without setting up a standard publishing format—double spaced, Times New Roman, 12 pt., title set one-third space down the page, and more. I just start typing regardless of what I know the manuscript should look like. 

And then comes editing. I do edit as I go along, correcting misspellings, poor sentence construction, misplaced modifiers, dangling particles, incomplete thoughts, and digressions. The last are the most obvious parts to get close attention at every stage—in the first typing of every brilliant thought (that dims as I progress through the sentence) and the first read-through (which usually has me gnashing my teeth and cringing in embarrassment). When I print out a draft I’m free with my pen—crossing out long sentences, half of a series of paragraphs, all those darlings we’re supposed to kill. 

But something has changed with this book. I’ve never had trouble blackening the majority of a paragraph or even a few pages and hitting delete, though I’m sad to see the fervid description of a newly arrived secondary character disappear. But I’ve always held to the belief that if it doesn’t belong there, wherever that is, it doesn’t belong anywhere. I’m not going to write a paragraph or a scene to fit it in, which in my view will just throw off another part of the story. In effect I accept that the material in question is throwing things off and it’s better to get rid of it. So I delete.

Only this time things are different. I’m copying first and saving to a separate document. Hmm. I didn’t plan to do this; I just found myself doing it. As I go along, pulling out passages that don’t really work no matter how much I like them, I’m shortening what I’ve got, but staying more tightly focused on the narrative. This isn’t a cozy or traditional mystery, so I have to pay attention to sections that are a little (or a lot) different from what I’m used to writing. And committed to this new genre, which seems like psychological suspense, I have less trouble erasing, deleting, removing. So why am I saving these rejections?

I don’t have an answer to that question, but I did have a surprise—for me at least. After several excisions of longish paragraphs, some of which I particularly liked and thought useful if not quite right where they were, I took a careful look at all of them, reading down the chunks of language written at different times and in different moods and for different purposes—description, character development, transitions, plotting. And the surprise was this—they all fit together. I don’t mean they all demonstrated my personal writing style, my quirks and particular interests in the details that reveal character. I mean in that both tone and sequence they made a single body of narrative with some of the connective tissue missing. When I returned to the main work in progress, I didn’t find anything missing. I hadn’t removed anything crucial. Yes, there are passages that need to be developed, but there are no obvious gaps. So what’s happening?

Apparently I’m writing two novels at once—two novels with the same set of characters and location, but different in tone and tension: a psychological suspense and a traditional mystery.

This is weird. The discovery suggests I have the traditional format so deep in my thinking that it’s going to pop up no matter what, and I have to learn to silence it.

This revelation has me wondering about all the passages I’ve trashed while writing, going back to the early 1990s and my efforts to write an acceptable, publishable first mystery. Murder in Mellingham began with a very different opening, and I remember writing numerous first chapters, each one affixed before the existing one until I had three opening chapters over forty pages and no idea what I was doing. Eventually I figured it out, but now I think about all those pages (and all those floppies) lost forever. I don’t know if I’m the only one who cuts and saves and discovers gold in the leavings, but now I have to push myself to focus on the main narrative—the one with bones and sinew and connective tissue and, I hope, coherence. It’s far from finished, so the struggle will continue.

Meanwhile, in the shadows (on another page on my computer) pulses a half-conscious tale that might or might not get enough connective tissue to become a finished traditional mystery. It’s weird. 

I am in the stumbling stage.  About a month ago I got what I thought was a brilliant idea for a mystery (aren’t they all?) and settled in to let the idea percolate and my unconscious have time to work on it, to throw up opening lines, character samples, little plot points, and the like. I scribbled, tried things out, and waited. A sentence here, a character description there. And still I waited. 

 Ready or not it was time to start writing, so I did. I had the opening scene—it was riveting. Definitely riveting. It took me a while to figure out what would come next (I’m a slow writer), but then the obvious occurred to me and I went at it. Another riveting scene. I was chugging right along when again something occurred to me. I envy other writers who seem to have a narrative and trajectory all worked out before they put fingertips to keys and zip right along. At this point I realized more should come after the opening scene, and before what I thought was the second scene. So back I went. But then that originally second scene had to be revised to fit a changed plot direction, and suddenly the narrator was older but I needed her to be younger, but not too much younger. I was either traveling in a circle or a spiral, neither of which was good. 

When I was much younger my parents took us hiking and camping—anything to get outdoors in the woods and on the mountains. Dad just wanted to be with the trees, so we followed a map for walks through the forests, crossing and recrossing the Appalachian Trail and other lesser-known paths. One I remember vividly promised we’d end at a crystal-clear lake and could run straight into the water for a swim. After the expected period of upping and downing along the trail we came to the end—and looked down at the lake, where a man was climbing out of a canoe along the sandy shore. The only problem was the lake was below us, several thousand feet below us, at the bottom of a sharp tree-covered decline. How we had gotten so lost is beyond me. But Dad was undeterred. He looked at us, at the lake, at the mountainside, and off we went through the brush and over the rocks and down the nearly vertical mountainside, leaving a solid trail behind us. We did arrive at the lake and collapsed on the sandy shore rather than run energetically into the water for a swim. Dad always got to where he wanted to go. I like to think I take after him—at least when I write. At this point in the draft I really don’t know where I’m going even though I think I can see the end over there, somewhere. I know I just have to keep going, so I do.

I call this the stumbling stage. Another example of the stumbling stage is this post. I was scheduled for the fourth Saturday, which was last week. But deep into my life-is-a-haze phase I was surprised to find I’d forgotten the fourth Saturday post. So here it is. 

This doesn’t help me get through the stumbling stage in my manuscript. There’s nothing for it but to keep going, and so far I’ve revised the complications four times, making them worse each time—for me, not the reader, because I haven’t worked out how the narrator is going to solve all these problems. I could do what some writers do and finesse the worst inventions and hope no one notices. (I’m not that lucky—I’d get emails.)  

Redoing the text so far is becoming something I can’t stop doing. It’s all right that the narrator isn’t as upset as she expected to be after a particular incidence. Okay, that’s human. But I can’t leave it there. I have to come up with an explanation—note I don’t say reason, because I’m moving beyond reason. First she thinks it’s deja vue, but that seems too mundane. She starts to wonder if this has something to do with a previous life. But then she remembers she doesn’t believe in reincarnation—too complicated for her, and depressing. Then she lands on the idea of synchronous lives. Huh? How did she come up with that one? I don’t even know what it means, or even if it means something.

This is definitely stumbling and the problem with this stage is that I’ve brought it on myself. I had to complicate things, deepen the motives and actions and people and even the weather. So how do I get out of it? First I write a post one week late. Second, well, I’m not sure about the narrator’s stumbling stage. I could just delete a lot of pages and see where I end up, or what I end up with. That could be interesting. So far the stage seems to be winning.

 The stumbling stage is not to be confused with writer’s block, which is only solved by a crisis calling the writer elsewhere, to avoid which ideas and words begin to flow. Nor is the problem solved by declaring it graphomania or hypergraphia. Either one seems easy to deal with. A glass of wine. A good friend. A sunny day and a porch. That’s such an appealing scene I may give that a try. If nothing else, my narrator may get to take a break too and we’ll work out this problem together.  

The question of place has been in the air and on blogs lately, including here in a useful post by Donalee Moulton. I’ve been thinking about another perspective that came up in my reading lately—location as muse.

Few writers or artists stay in one locale but if they do so it’s because of a special affinity for that one place. Wendell Berry is well known for his series of novels and short stories about the fictional Port William, set in his beloved Kentucky, as well as for his nonfiction on the issues besieging farmers and farm communities. By focusing on one location, Berry creates an entire community of interrelated families, histories of growth and change, and effects of changes in the larger, surrounding world. His narrow focus on one place, one he knows well, has led to a prolific career in both fiction and nonfiction, including poetry. Reading even one book introduces the reader to an entire family, way of life (farming), and community (Port William).

Sally Mann, the photographer, has made the same choice by focusing on Lexington, Virginia, her home state. She’s known for her photographs of children and families as well as the area in Virginia.

I think of these two artists because their work stands out for its depth and breadth while not straying far from home. Each piece is linked to another, and each location is explored in several ways. I think of these two writers also because I understand their sense of rootedness and its importance. It’s a truism to say that our place shapes us, but it is less often observed that we are still most often limited in our understanding of what that location means, of how it shapes us, of what the consequences are.

When I began writing crime fiction I created a fictional town, Mellingham, which is really the town I grew up in. Several readers have asked if that town is really X or Y, usually referring to a small town in Essex County they’re familiar with. The only people who recognize the place are those who live there, and have for some time. (The key, which few seem to consider, is the layout of certain streets.)

There are seven books in the Mellingham series, and I have long considered these enough because these seven stories complete the trajectory of Chief Joe Silva’s adult life, his progression from a chronically reluctant bachelor to a devoted stepfather in a committed relationship. But there are more stories in Mellingham, and more corners of the town that have yet to be explored. I’ve been struggling with this question for some time—do I continue the Mellingham series, or let it go (as I have) and continue with the two other series that haven’t reached their finale. Anita Ray, in the Anita Ray series, isn’t getting any closer to finding a partner or changing her carefree life of sleuthing with and without a camera. Felicity O’Brien, in the Pioneer Valley series, is more likely to reach her fitting ending, which includes changes to her beloved farm. But I’m not sure I want to write that one either.

The commitment to a single place means we see more of it. We see what we don’t need as well as what we think we need for a particular story. For me, knowing the town’s history also means a cacophony of voices from the past calling to me to resolve the mystery of the unusual tools found in the shed of what was once a furniture workshop in the 1930s. Or the story of a small freestanding ballroom converted to a condo in the middle of a pasture where no flock of four-legged animals ever roamed. The loss of craftsmanship in modern industry circles around the first history and the changing world of New England social life is hidden in the second. 

For me, writing a crime novel isn’t a question of merely coming up with an idea and planting it in a preferred location. I struggle with setting as much as with character. The ideas I spelled out above are organic to the place, and understanding how that can be so defines the story. To tell the story of one particular small-scale furniture workshop I have to resuscitate the Mellingham series. Some stories are so insistent. They can be worse than some characters (alive and fictional).

I’ve had the Mellingham series on my mind because Worldwide Mystery is reprinting the last two books in the Mellingham series for its book club as well as general sales. Chief Joe Silva retired, but the town is still there, and its history unhidden. What to do, what to do.

Back in the Dark Ages, probably only in the 1980s though it feels like it was that long ago, I was hired to edit the manuscript of a visiting scholar at MIT who was considered “very important.” As a result, another academic had already taken a pass over his ms before it was sent to the press and then to me. I don’t know why they did this, but they did. It was probably a warning, akin to carrots are good for you, and so is liver.

The ms was pretty clean, as we say, and I settled down for what I considered an easy job. My biggest decision was how to style certain topic titles that he used throughout the book. I scanned the pages, saw no consistent choice had been made, and picked a format that wouldn’t clutter up the page visually and yet be clear for the reader. I chugged along happily, with few other editorial issues to slow me down, and turned in the ms on time. Piece of cake.

About a week later I heard from the helpful academic who had read the ms first and, unknown to me (and not evident to me or anyone else), had made some stylistic choices that, in my drive for consistency, I had reversed, and instead imposed another stylistic choice, mine. To this day I still wonder that he thought he had sent over a completely edited ms.

I rarely edited fiction, but when we first set up the Larcom Review, in 1998, that changed, and I learned that writers of fiction have a different attitude to editing compared to writers of nonfiction, and I don’t argue with it most of the time. In one short story, the only change I made was to remove a single comma. The author restored it. The story was not, I hasten to explain, a mystery but a literary story, so perhaps that explains it.

Editing is always on my mind, but especially now because the editors at Crime Spell Books are editing the sixth anthology this summer. Death Camas will be out in the fall, in October, but the work is done in the summer. The other editors have turned in their changes, and I’m adding mine. So far the editors fall into two camps, those who take out commas, and those who put them in. My job is to integrate my edits and approve the ms changes overall.

At this point in a discussion about editing someone always pops up with the infamous quote: “Consistency—the hobgoblin of small minds.” At which point I used to send them to some poorly edited books so they could enjoy a text free of consistency and even coherence sometimes.

The trouble with editing is we all need it, no one wants to admit they need it, and amateurs aren’t really clear on what it is or entails. But it’s good for all of us, like veggies. One or two of my Beta readers have also been editors and I always looked forward to what I could learn from their reports and responses. Good editing is like a healthy dessert, an oatmeal cookie instead of a chocolate torte, after a healthy main course of composing the ms.

I’ve stretched the food metaphor till it’s ready to snap, if I can mix metaphors here (and I can because I’m the author), but we all come up against editing. How we feel about it is key to how much we’ll benefit from it. I try to tell other writers that it doesn’t mean they have to take every suggestion (and each editorial change should be considered a suggestion), but they should care enough about their work to think about why the editor made the change. Is the editor following a strict grammatical rule that offers no flexibility? Does the change take a light-hearted verbal twist and reduce it to a pedestrian phrase? Does the editorial change erase an allusion to another story or author, something to entertain the well-read mystery fan? Is the editor’s change clarifying an idea the author struggled with but couldn’t quite express satisfactorily?

Editing is work. If you love working with words, as I do, it can also be fun. Done with respect for the work and the author, editing can steady a ms, an overarching idea, strengthen the work’s best qualities. Editor and author always have the same goal: to take a good book and make it better.