Tag: editing

Reframing

~ susanoleksiw ~ 6 Comments

Reframing is a well-established psychological tool for tackling problems that may seem intractable, and I found myself appreciating it recently.

For the last three years two other writers and I spend much of the spring and summer working on the annual anthology Best New England Crime Stories published by Crime Spell Books. All three of us read and select the stories, and all three of us edit. All the other duties are split. Ang Pompano sends out the acceptance or rejection emails and works on promotion, developing ads and the like. Leslie Wheeler manages the books, and works on sales opportunities. I get to write jacket copy, and lay out the book for POD. We have a great cover designer, and all three of us weigh in on the art and design. We review each other’s work, offer suggestions, and manage to put out a book we’re proud of every year while also having fun at our launch at Crime Bake in November.

Writing jacket copy is perhaps the least onerous job of a writer with a book going to press. My practice has been to look over the list of stories, arrange them in loose groups, and talk about the kinds of crimes they contain. I wrote the copy this month and sent it around to Ang and Leslie. Both liked it but Leslie had a response I hadn’t expected but found provocative. With all the talk of crime in the news today, depressing for everyone, perhaps we could focus on the characters who are fighting back, challenging the criminals or the system. This immediately appealed to me, and I ditched the first draft and reshuffled my note cards.

Looking at these stories from the perspective of the range of characters caught up in circumstance of crime and its consequences changed the way I viewed them and let me see beyond the cleverness of the plot, the range of characters swirling around incidents, the grounding bit of information, the unexpected twist. Most were ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances finding something within they didn’t realize they had. They were sometimes stymied by their situations, tripped up by bad luck or trapped by betrayal, but they were a match to the challenge, though not all succeeded in bringing about justice.

By reframing I also got closer to a different view of the crime. When a crime is committed it is most often by a person shriveled by life and seeking an unimaginative solution. An ordinary scam inspires a docile matron, and a drug addict discovers how far he has gone on the path to a. new life, and what his world is really like, something most readers will never experience. For others, following clues and solving a crime leads to a painful reckoning. Rewriting the jacket copy turned out, also, to be more challenging than cataloging a variety of crimes. As expected, the protagonists in these twenty-four stories were a varied lot.

With every year, we three editors choose stories that we think are well written, well thought out, and interesting as fiction. Because it’s crime fiction there is an understandable emphasis on the structure, the plot with a crime and its solution. But with a change in perspective, a reframing, I find myself appreciating the range of personalities grappling with life’s body blows. There is a richness not as easily appreciated otherwise. I hope our readers will feel the same way when the book is out in November.

The Blank Page

~ susanoleksiw ~ 5 Comments

Like many writers before me, I get a deadline for an assignment and spend the days, weeks, or even months leading up to it thinking about what I’ll write. If I pick something lighthearted, I have to consider just how far to go in the humor direction. If the topic is serious, I worry I’ll sound earnest (Oh, the shame!). Either way, I let my mind wander, make a few notes as I go along (and try to keep them on the same pad of paper), and sit down to write with ample time to revise and edit. And then on the day when I’m supposed to post, I plan to finish the essay with a light and quick rewrite, just to keep it fresh. I open a new page, and there it is. The blank page. I’m catatonic.

What is it about the blank page that makes my brain go blank as well? I look at that white sheet which now has the vastness and strangeness of the Sahara covered with a blanket of snow, and I haven’t a thought in my head. Not even an idea that I’m looking at a blank sheet of paper on a computer screen. Nothing. 

I had so much to write about this morning at 5:30 a.m. I woke up to the morning sun lightening the New England sky, reminding me that today was supposed to be a nice day, upper 50s along the coast, possibly even hitting 60 degrees. A good day to be outside tackling the weeds and cleaning things up for spring planting. I had the luxury of just lying there thinking about all that I could do today after I posted my blog for the fourth Saturday, my regular day for Ladies of Mystery.  But by the time I got to my desk and laptop, something unbeknownst to me was draining my brain of every idea I’ve ever had.

I’ve thought about ways to cheat the blank page of its power to cripple me. It’s possible that pulling up a page from an earlier post will stimulate my tired synapses to get popping, but then I have to make a decision and choose a page. Nope. Still crippled. I could pull up a page from the novel I’m working on (and have been since last summer—what’s with that?) but then I’m liable to fall right into my usual funk of trying to figure out what’s wrong that scene or the other one in the same chapter. Not good for morale, which I need right now.

If you, reading this, are also a writer, you’ve probably already shut your eyes hard against a painful memory of a blank page, the one that just wouldn’t let you get started on what you hoped would be your greatest ever WIP. This experience drives me to question, what is the purpose of the blank page? And I’ve decided it’s the Universe’s way to test us, to make sure we know what we’re doing. If I pulled up a new page and started tapping out advice for ingrown toenails, the Universe would be telling me I’m in the wrong business—I’m not a writer; I’m a frustrated podiatrist. Perhaps I decide to explore the drawing or designing function on my computer. Okay. Problem. No words. 

The blank page is the test for me every time. I don’t know what I’m going to write. Even if I think I do, I don’t know what’s going to come out. No matter how much I plan, no matter how much energy I waste on sample paragraphs or opening lines, the minute I look at that blank page, I go blank, white, empty, nothing. And then something comes up, something not planned, not expected, not even understood sometimes. There it is, and a wonder among wonders, For me writing is like breathing. I don’t really know how it works, but I know that it does and that’s enough for me. I thank the Gods of Desperation and go on typing.

Facing the blank page forces me back on myself every time—challenging me to trust that whatever shows up, making my fingers wiggle and stretch, spreading those black squiggly things across the white space, has to be what matters to me at that moment. On this I have no questions, which is good because I also have no answers. I take it all on faith.

I write because I have to, and I accept what comes also because I have to. It’s me.

The End Is Nigh

~ janispattersonmysteries ~ 5 Comments

by Janis Patterson

For every beginning there is an ending… and conversely, for every ending there is a beginning… and sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.


This year has been a landmark year for me – it’s been one of the lowest output years for me in well over a decade (only two books as opposed to the four or five I usually do) and yet I’ve been busier than I ever have.
In case you have been living under a rock and not heard about my republishing blitz I’m going to give you a quick précis…


During the covid crazies I got very lazy. The Husband was home – and even retired during this time – s0 we had things to do and my writing business came in a distant second to being with him. I knew that rights on previously published books were coming back to me, but being distracted by other things I just let the reversion letters pile up on my computer.


Until January of this year. Life was returning to a semblance of normal and I realized I wasn’t getting any younger (are any of us?) and if I wanted to get back into this writing thing I had to get busy, so a good start would be republishing those reverted books through my own company. A quick wander through my hard drive shocked me, because there were 26 (yes, TWENTY SIX) of the little beasties. Gulp.


A quick perusal decided me that for various reasons four of them were going permanently ‘under the bed,’ hopefully never to be seen again. That left 22 to be republished. As I am lazy, doing that could possibly take a couple of years, years which I might not have. As I was raised in advertising and journalism, the fact that deadlines are sacred is bred into my blood and bones. My father taught me that (to use his words) “There is only one excuse for you to miss a deadline, and that is death. Yours.”


So I set myself a deadline – I would release a book freshly edited, freshly formatted and most with new covers every other Wednesday until all were out, starting on January 15. MISTLETOE MAGIC, the last book, comes out October 25.
22 books released every other Wednesday, each on schedule, each reworked as promised and all without missing a single release day. (Actually, there were 24 released – one through one of my publishers and the other as an outlier which appeared suddenly through a set of circumstances too complex to go in to… neither of which I counted as part of the blitz.)


I’m exhausted. I would love to take a few weeks off away from the computer, but I have deadlines… one for a July 4th mystery anthology, one for my new Flora Melkiot book and one for a summer Regency romance anthology. Sigh. Even though we spend our days pretty much in the same room (the den) The Husband says I spend more time with the computer and my invisible friends than with him and lately he’s been right. I’ve taken my computer along on every trip we’ve made this year – and it saved my sometimes tenuous sanity the days we were holed up in a motel in Mississippi when he fell ill on our way home from NINC!


Anyway, the blitz is now over and the encroaching deadlines await. It doesn’t get any easier, people. It really doesn’t.

And now for some good news! EXERCISE IS MURDER is now available in audio from Audible! (The ebook is available from Amazon and will hopefully be available in paperback before too long… it is the first appearance of the redoubtable Flora Melkiot!)

Those Pesky Revisions

~ susanoleksiw ~ 8 Comments

Once in a while I come across a new writer asking what to do now that he’s finished his novel and is ready to get an agent. As the conversation flows I hear the optimistic assumption that even though this process will take time, it will end well. Left unsaid is the ending—the book will be published to blushingly great acclaim. I seem to come across these discussions when I’m in the deepest slough of revision. Right now I’m on the third rewrite for my current WIP (not to mention all the many drafts I did before I naively thought it was finished). It came back from my agent with lots of compliments on certain parts of it but not the first hundred pages.

“Get rid of the BOGSATs,” she wrote.

BOGSAT? This was new to me, so I had to ask. What is a BOGSAT? It’s embarrassing that I didn’t know what it refers to because I’m certainly guilty of having a lot of BOGSATs in the first third of the book. For those of you who know what I’m talking about, you can stop reading here. You know what follows.

BOGSAT refers to Bunch Of Guys Sitting Around Talking. In other words, too much talk, not enough action. In my case, the people sitting around talking were mostly women, the main character’s mother and sisters, and occasionally the MC and her best friend. One of the themes of the book is female relationships, and families. Nevertheless, respecting my agent’s judgment as I do, I set about removing the BOGSATs, and this is where it gets interesting.

What happens in place of talking? Action, of course. As I stripped out a stretch of dialogue I held onto the specific information that needed to be delivered. In one scene, it’s important for Ginny to learn that the parents of two children under the care of the social services agency where she works have been arguing about money. If her co-worker can’t tell her this and ask for her advice, how does Ginny find out there is a money issue in the family? She catches a glimpse of the husband wearing a coat that he can’t possibly afford. How does she know this? Her sister sees it, drools over it, and tells her sister how much it probably cost. Her sister wants one. That took care of one scene, about five pages in the first hundred. On to the next.

Ginny is worried about something from her teen years becoming public. It’s linked to an event long forgotten, or so she thinks. At a celebration of life for an acquaintance, the man leading the program blurts out the deceased’s role in the event. Ginny wonders how long her secret can last.

In a grocery store she can’t simply stop and chat with someone to elicit information. Hmm. She spots an out of town reporter who has been investigating the event of concern to Ginny stopping people as they come out of the store. She notices who rebuffs him, who ignores him, and whom he ignores. The chief has told her about him, and she wonders just how much he’s uncovered. She soon finds out. The reporter wasn’t in the earlier version. He appeared only as the author of an article. Now he’s on the ground, poking around, making Ginny nervous. She’s keeping track of him.

Removing dialogue does more than eliminate the “talkiness” in the ms. It means I have to use the other characters differently, use Ginny differently, uncover little bits I hadn’t thought about before. Getting rid of the BOGSATs is changing the story little by little. Ginny Means will still be who she is doing what she does, but how she interacts with other characters is becoming different. There is a place for the BOGSAT, but it’s not in the first third of my book.

John Cleese on Creativity

~ susanoleksiw ~ 7 Comments

A few years ago I heard a talk by John Cleese on creativity. Readers may remember him from Fawlty Towers and Monty Python, and the antic skits of the characters.

Cleese didn’t talk about the expected issues of creating characters or structuring story lines. His focus was on creativity broadly defined, and how each one of us can learn to be creative. One comment in particular stayed with me because it seemed simple but also hard. It wasn’t particularly profound but it was the kind of insight that came as the result of experience. He said one of his co-workers jumped on the first idea that came, he was sure it would work, and he insisted on going forward with that. I certainly understand the feeling of facing a problem in a story and having a solution fall into my brain that seems absolutely perfect because I want it to be perfect. Not knowing what to write next is extremely uncomfortable. Maybe other writers don’t feel that way, but I certainly do. My instinct is to grab the solution and run, grateful for having an answer to my problem pop up.

Cleese’s warning was this. The first idea to come isn’t the best. His co-worker, Cleese felt, invariably produced something far less successful or not at all successful than what he would have developed if he’d waited. Cleese’s point, put less elegantly, is to consider the first idea the clutter that is concealing the better ideas, which require more time to surface. As frustrating as this can be, he’s right. 

Living with uncertainty is hard especially when you want to maintain the forward motion of the narrative. You’ve set up your characters to act and now you’ve got them marking time, marching back and forth across the page, and you’re worried they’ll lose their mojo. 

My current WIP seemed finished—polished and well put together, the story arc complete. I had a quiet doubt that maybe one or two aspects weren’t quite right, but I was ready to attribute those to the usual insecurities of the writer. I was wrong to do so. I just got the ms back with comments that hit those passages, and they need work. (Thank Heavens for the honest reader.)

This feedback reminded me of an earlier experience when an academic colleague gave me a draft of an article to read and comment on. I pointed out the various spots where he hadn’t answered related questions. He insisted they didn’t matter, but I felt they did. “You have all these puzzle pieces that are part of the question, but you only resolve half of them. You have to resolve all of them,” I told him, “to justify your conclusion.”

In my mystery novel I’m dealing with creating steps in the logic based on facts I created. To solve the problems of the plot, I have to sit with it for several days, listening to the characters, and letting the desire to get things on paper fall away while I wait for my unconscious to work. I have to be patient and trust my own creative resources. I have no idea how long this will take, but it’s necessary. And once the hidden ideas come to light, things will start to make sense, and I can move forward.

If you want to learn more about John Cleese’s approach to creativity, you can explore his book Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide by John Cleese, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50719532-creativity