I’m having an unusually quiet (writing) week, listening to the noise of a hammer and a radio playing on the lawn as workers repair my porch. I could write during the racket, interspersed with the sounds of traffic and occasional voices passing on the sidewalk. But instead I’m marveling at how clear my to-do list is. This summer, instead of planning to get the Crime Spell Books anthology out the door to KDP in September, it’s almost ready to go—in August. I have time to work on a short story and the sixth Anita Ray mystery. How did this happen, I ask?

Over the last several years, I’ve trimmed my volunteer activities, cutting back on responding to last-minute requests for help, or invitations to join another committee. But as I see blocks of time open up and think of things I’ve put off and can now get to, I’m reminded of something else. I didn’t get here on my own. I had help. 

The one key reason I continue to volunteer for various groups devoted to writers and writing, artists and their mediums, is I believe in the importance of sharing what I know with others. When I started out writing, back in the 1980s and even earlier, in college, friends read my work and offered suggestions. That meant they took time for me. I joined a writer’s group, the first of several, and listened carefully to how they commented on each other’s work in a way that was clear and respectful, and vowed to always do the same. I went to classes, asked questions, offered to help organize workshops, and read other writers’ work. As my skills improved, and I began to publish short fiction and then novels, I was invited to participate on conference panels. I read and commented on work by writers I didn’t know, wrote reviews, composed blurbs. I enjoyed it all.

The kind of volunteer work I do with and for other writers has changed over the years. My initial modest reader responses to someone’s new story has now been replaced with a critique of how a panel will work with these writers or those, who brings what to the table and how will the writers complement each other. I refer new writers to agents I think will like their work, I advise writers interested in self-publishing what that will mean (or not mean).

I think it matters that writers share what they have learned on their own or from others, participate in the larger community, and help bring along new writers. We benefit from working with each other. Even during my college years, when I worked on the student humor magazine, I understood that to succeed, we had to work with each other. That has never not been true in all the years since. I’ve enjoyed watching new writers find their voice, an agent, a publisher; established writers try something new; others take a risk and stretch themselves. That “top of the heap” some strive for is not a peak; it’s a mesa. There’s a lot of room at the top, or whatever we call it. Sharing it with others is more fun than standing there alone.

Several of my stories and mystery novels were worked out on paper before I began writing. I had blocks of story parts, notes on a particular character, and no sense of how the whole thing went together. As a pantser, I was willing to wait and then let it all come together when I started writing. This is an act of faith, and for some definitely reckless. But for me it feels like pulling a multicolored shawl around my shoulders, sinking into the warmth and richness of it, and letting the idea germinate. But these days the thinking part is taking longer and longer.

Some of my more recent stories are based on ideas or scenes that came to me years and years ago. Most often if an idea doesn’t take form within a month or so, I abandon it, or just as likely it abandons me. But some of these old snatches of a story I overheard, a piece of a scene that still flickers in my imagination, linger and don’t seem to change. When this happens I know there’s a story there, but I don’t seem to know how to get to it. 

This is where I can hear some of my fellow writers telling me to just sit down and write it out. There’s no mystery to it, as you know, Susan. It’s just a matter of doing the work. Most of the time I would agree. But there are some ideas that need more than an artificial structure composed for working them out on paper to be realized. These are the ones that hover in the back of my mind, like a dream that might be bad, might be good, but won’t fade. 

I’m not the only one who feels this way. A few years ago I was at a book event with other writers and found myself chatting with a writer I had met a number of times but didn’t really know. We talked about our work, what we were reading, and the days ahead. And then she said something that I recognized instantly.

“I think I’m ready for the next story. I can feel it growing. I’m ready to start writing.”

I knew exactly what she meant and how she felt. The story idea is there, gestating, growing, pushing through the reticence, the hesitation, the doubt, ready to emerge from the nib of my pen or the keys on the computer keyboard. At that moment I know I need one last step. Who is going to tell the story—that, for me, is the key to unlocking the whole thing. And once I know who the narrator is, the story unfolds before me, and it’s just a matter of me keeping up with the flow. The preparation time, if I can call it that, takes years. The writing takes a couple of days or fewer for a short story, a couple of months, writing full time, for a novel. The closer the story is to real life, a real event, the less rewriting, or fixing, is required. The characters act out according to their natures, their proclivities already established by where I found them in the basic idea. 

The hardest lesson in working on a story that arrives in this manner is to not tamper with it, to trust my own unconscious to deliver the narrative I can feel inside me. Sometimes I don’t know what the ending will be, but when I sense it coming, and understand what it probably has to be, I have to trust where I am and where I’m going and not tamper with it.

Not every story arrives in this way. I’ve constructed plenty from a simple What If beginning. But those that haunt my memory are different, and require a different writer response from me. From the few of these I’ve composed and published, I’ve learned discipline, trust that my writing brain knows what it’s doing, and faith that whatever is happening is something worthwhile. These stories tend not to have a happy ending, but they are realistic and honest. And for me that’s enough.

I’ve been taking time this summer to catch up on my reading, which is a fancy way of saying that I’m reading those books that I’m embarrassed to say I never read when they came out or, in the case of a bunch of dead white men, when I was in college.  I’m picking out books with titles known to just about everyone.

Reviewers are prone to lot of literary fallacies—the main character is really the author, the entire novel is autobiographical, the hero is the author’s cousin who got into drugs in exactly the same way, and on and on. These reviews can spoil the book for some of us, me, for instance, by messing up how I see the entanglements. I’m glad to not read the reviews, and go by nothing more than the familiarity of the title. Who hasn’t heard of Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, or John Updike’s Couples? Both gave rise to hours of juicy gossip and, just as likely, a lot of ill will. I’m glad to ignore the warnings, which are also suggestions on “how to read” the book. I don’t need to be told where the story blossoms into personal truth.

Often when I’m reading I come to a passage that stops me, holds me from riding forward on the narrative river. There is something in the tone, the detail, the feeling that tells me this really happened. This is real, this is the truth. It could be lines in the dialogue, a setting and how the main character, or a secondary character, reacts to it; it could be a surprise, a reversal, in behavior, a character stepping out of character. But the sense that I’ve come to something out of the author’s life is compelling and convincing—the feeling conveyed reaches me. The passage may go on for several pages, or no more than a few paragraphs, but it does come to an end, and the story flows on as before.

I occasionally recognize the same quality in nonfiction, when the author comes to a moment of truth, as it were, and her struggle with it is revealed on the page. It may or may not be the issue that is the focus of the work, and may not be resolved, but it’s there for the reader to recognize and dwell on. I found this in Sister Helen Prejean’s Dead Man Walking, and have wondered if she returned to it later.

Occasionally a reader will ask me if a certain passage is real, or, more likely if it’s another writer, she’ll say, that really happened. And in most cases she would be right. When we’re writing, we’re pulling things out of ourselves to make sense on the page, and after doing this for a while, a few minutes or an hour, we may be so deep into the excavation, touching things set aside, that we don’t record in our own mind that this is different from the surrounding passages. 

Choosing a setting because it’s real and readers will recognize it is not the same thing. Using a real politician as a character because he is known to readers isn’t the same thing either. The passage that stands out is something whose meaning and experience is known only to the writer, but when it is shared, it is recognized and felt as special by the reader.

For me, as both writer and reader, this is the best part of the entire experience because I know I’ve come to a passage that is true and unique, lived and remembered and shared. 

I’ve been a member of the Authors Guild for several years, but didn’t host my website there until SquareSpace told me I couldn’t have a newsletter without a certain kind of email, which I didn’t know how to create. Rather than learn what was probably a pretty easy task, I decided to move my website to the Guild. Once there I could tap into their newsletter function.

After barely using it for the last few years, I received a notice that the Guild has decided to drop the newsletter function from its website citing both cost and logistics. I can hardly blame them. I’m probably part of the logistics issue, since almost every quarter I had trouble figuring out how to get the newsletter out there, into cyberspace. Hector sent me clear instructions, which became less clear as time passed between newsletters until, after a while, they ceased to make any sense at all.

I won’t miss the newsletter function, and I’m pretty sure the few people who asked to get the modest publication from me won’t miss it either. Let me be the first to say it: My newsletters weren’t riveting. I can’t even remember what I wrote. Several author newsletters come into my email box regularly, and I scan them. Some are archly self-deprecating. Some are breathless with news. Some are clearly filled with, well, filler because the writer has better things to do than write something for this medium. And some are interesting, the result of thought and effort. I’m impressed.

For most writers, from what I can see, newsletters have the main purpose of reminding readers that the writer is out there, working away on whatever the current project is, and making sure that readers don’t forget her or him. It’s basically the wave and calling yoohoo across the street.

Once in a great while I get one that I enjoy reading mostly because it’s not a sales pitch; it’s about something in particular that I’m interested in, or become interested in because of the short piece the writer has taken time to develop. But most newsletters could end and I wouldn’t miss any of them.

What I do miss, to my surprise, is my old site on Blogger. It was nothing but a blog page with my books listed on the side columns and a growing list of followers. (Silly as it is, I was proud of that.) It was easy to manage, and easier to find. But life got complicated and a website seemed the better choice. I wouldn’t say that today.

I haven’t been keeping up with my blog because I don’t want to waste my time writing and anyone else’s time reading something that is contrived rather than something that really is on my mind. I do have a few of those coming up, but here’s where things get tricky. Once I acknowledge that something is nagging at me, I spend some time thinking about it. And then a solution appears, and the problem no longer nags at me and hence I no longer have an interest in writing about it. I doubt I’m original in this. When I look at it this way, I’m surprised anyone gets a newsletter out there, regularly or irregularly.

This is all of a piece with my love/hate relationship with social media. The AG newsletter was reliable in that I could vet comments (deleting those that I found offensive or fishy) and keep out the inevitable bots and scammers. Since hackers seem to descend on various sites all at once, without any logic behind their choices that I can see, I sometimes think I should delete everything on social media, but I’m not sure that would solve any problems.

What you’re reading now is the typical writer’s unsettled grappling with a blessing and a curse—social media in all its forms. If we write or do anything creative, we want to reach an audience, we want our work to be read, and we want readers to be able to reach us. The journey between writer and reader is fraught with shoals, quicksand, hurricanes, sea monsters, a broken compass, pirates, and sometimes worse. It’s easy to forget that a good newsletter is an ongoing conversation with individuals who know the writer’s publications and interests and views; a reader who may, as has happened to me, talk about a character as though he or she were a friend of the family, someone known and cared for. I have friends who write to me about Anita Ray, and sometimes giggle about things Auntie Meena gets up to as though they had just seen her. These readers remind me of how fond I am of her, and why I keep up the Anita Ray series. (There’s another one in the works.)

So what is the upshot? I may send out one more newsletter informing people that this one is the end, and then hope they’ll pay closer attention to my blog. But that also means that I have to pay closer attention to it. 

I write for this blog, Ladies of Mystery, faithfully once a month. To this light burden, I can probably add a blog post at least once a month on my website. We’ll see how that goes. Right now, blogging occasionally is enough for me. And I’ll keep looking for problems to write about.

I’ve just finished writing a story that took me almost twenty-five years to compose, and not because I’m a slow writer either. Doris Lessing once said that “writing is probably like a scientist thinking about some scientific problem, or an engineer about an engineering problem.” Based on my experience with this story, I have to agree.

All those years ago I heard a woman make a comment about a divorced man’s new life. She was a friend of his ex-wife, who remained not so much bitter as still stunned years later. As I learned more about his conduct, I could understand her reaction to the divorce. The scene the friend described to me remained vivid in my memory, and I couldn’t put it to rest, forget about it and bury in in the ash heap of ideas that never went anywhere. So I thought about it. 

Just sitting down and composing a story of the tacky, mean-spirited, selfish ex-husband wouldn’t make an edifying story—we all know too many people like that. So what was the story? And who would tell it? That last question was the key—someone on the outside, not in the family and not in the circle of friends. I landed on a low-level staff person in his office, and at that point the story opened up. It rolled out in front of me like the proverbial red carpet, the stairs up into the blue sky, the plane on the runway. I didn’t know where I was going but I knew I was moving.

Because I was focusing on one character in particular as she dealt with a man of very specific weaknesses I knew all I had to do was follow her through her work and off days. The story from my friend, only a scene she had viewed, developed into this young woman’s story, and went where neither one of us expected. 

This sounds easy—just listen to someone else’s throwaway comment and you have a story. But it wasn’t that easy. I had the scene in my head for all those years, and I could not feel anything growing whenever I thought about it. What finally worked was looking at it as a problem to be solved. Here is the scene. This is the kernel of the story—this can’t be changed. It leads to the end. How do I get there? What do I need? I need a main character to follow, a setting where this man can reveal his weaknesses, a cast of characters that will reveal themselves at the crisis, and an ending that is honest no matter how awful or unsatisfying. (Just looking back at it now the whole thing seems daunting. As long as I didn’t think about all this at once I could make progress.)

I do some of this with other short stories and crime novels, but in those I have more control over where I go with the plot. In this story I was committed to ending with that scene given to me by my friend—it said far more than any one of us wants to hear, see, or experience.

When the story was finished, I was mildly depressed. I felt drained. That’s very unusual for me. My imagination might feel tapped out some days after meeting a deadline, but my emotional reserves have almost always felt bottomless (an illusion, but I like it), and I cheerfully look around for the next project.

Not every story proceeds in this manner. Some are so much fun to write that I’m sad when they come to an end. Some are easily and obviously constructed and I delight in their form and flow, and almost want to pat them on the head, like a well-behaved dog, at the end. But this one left me feeling satisfied, like I had just accomplished something I’d finally set out to do. I also think it’s one of my best. 

You can read it for yourself and be the judge. It’ll be in Snakeberry, the 2025 anthology from Crime Spell Books, out in November.