Tag: writing

What’s Your Method? By Karen Shughart

~ kshughart47 ~ 2 Comments

I recently read an article about renowned American author, John Steinbeck, who gave six tips on writing that were included in a letter he wrote in 1962 to a friend. These caused me to reflect on how I write my cozy mysteries, and I was astonished to realize how much of his advice applied to me. Below are the tips with my italicized notes beside them:

  1. Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised. I don’t write every day, but when I do I try to write at least a chapter or two. I don’t have pages in mind; instead, I aim for 60,000-75,000 words, the length for cozies.
  2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material. This one hit home. I write the entire story and revise and expand afterword, my first draft is typically too short.
  3. Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theatre, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one. Instead of picking a person, I write towards a targeted audience, mainly women (and some men) who are middle-aged or older. Cozies are called “clean” novels because they do not contain graphic language or violence or explicit sex scenes, something that appeals to my readers.
  4. If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole, you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there. I do this a lot. See below.
  5. Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing. I have a slash and burn mentality when it comes to writing. I may fall in love with a scene, but I’m brutal about cutting it if it doesn’t fit.
  6. If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech. I do this with every character. Sometimes when I’m writing dialogue for a male, I check with my husband to see if it sounds authentic.

So, there you have it. I hope you authors reading this blog take time to reflect on your own writing methods. For those of you who are our readers, perhaps you’ve gained a little insight into the writing process, at least for John Steinbeck and to a lesser extent, me..

What’s in a Title? by Heather Haven

~ Heather Haven ~ 7 Comments

A lot of times the story itself comes fairly easily to me, but the title often doesn’t. What to call my novel? How do I catch the reader’s eye and have them want to buy my book, just by reading that stellar title? How, how, how? Hmmmm.

And to make things worse, book titles seem to go through fads or phases. For instance, the word “girl” has been used in just about every best-selling book’s title in the last few years. While using that word may not have catapulted them to becoming a best-seller, the following books were best sellers: Girl Gone; The Girl on a Train; Girl, Interrupted; Girl with the Pearl Earring; The Other Boleyn Girl; and of course, Stieg Larsson’s trilogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; The Girl Who Played with Fire; and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.  

Hence, I decided to use the word “girl” in the title of a book and see what happens. I came up with Girl, Girl, Girl (see book cover). Amazingly, it didn’t sell. Maybe my heart wasn’t in it? Besides, I don’t think of human females as girls unless they’re under the age of 17. I’m not sure why that’s my cut-off age, but it is. I think once you’ve graduated from high school, you’re a young woman. Girl-kid, Woman-adult.

Often the title lets the reader know what kind of book they will be reading. I hope I’ve done that with my books. Whoops. The exception to this was the title of the very first book of the Alvarez Family Murder Mysteries, Murder is a Family Business. Looking back on it, I believe the title conveys a weightier book than mine. I had forgotten a famous crime syndicate called, Murder, Inc. was still in a lot of people’s minds. Guilt by association was my problem. Some readers, especially men, bought my book thinking it was going to be yet another exposé of the mob. Or possibly a written spin-off of the movie Murder, Inc, the film that launched Peter Falk’s career in his first major role as a contract killer.

Yikes. None of the above is anything like my book, a light-hearted romp through California’s Bay Area where not only is the murderer brought to justice but the shoes and handbags match. If I could, I would change the title, but the book has been hanging around for a certain amount of time, has had some small measure of success, and, besides, I can’t think of anything better. So, Murder is a Family Business it remains.

But since that goof with the first title, I tried to be careful in naming the rest. My latest book, a work in progress, has the working title, Bewitched, Bothered, and Beheaded. Hopefully, it conveys magic and murder. And if someone thinks of a guillotine, so much the better.

In closing, I should probably mention the title of an Elvis Presley movie, Girls, Girls, Girls. It has nothing to do with any of this, but I am a huge Elvis fan.

Words on the Page

~ susanoleksiw ~ 6 Comments

In one of the longest-running writing groups I participated in, our discussions often wandered into related areas but never very far afield. They were always informative, at least to me. One discussion in particular has remained with me. 

The de facto leader of the group asked apropos of nothing if we ever wrote anything other than fiction. Aside from the occasional memo for work, everyone said no, except for me. As both a free-lance writer/editor and later an employee in a social services agency, I wrote all the time. When I was freelancing, I wrote chapters for textbooks, articles short and long, lots of book reviews, and edited dozens of books. As an employee I wrote countless fundraising letters, newsletters for our donors, and a never-ending list of grant applications and reports. For me the job search meant finding an opportunity to write.

I wrote a novel (incredibly bad) in college along with short stories (mostly so-so), and in my first job afterwards, as a social worker, I wrote long detailed reports of my visits to children’s homes, foster homes, family court sessions, and other agencies. My long-winded exercises in leaving nothing out sat alongside the terser reports of my colleagues, who managed to say much the same thing in a tenth of the space. 

This observation came to me recently when in the process of cleaning out old files and boxes I came across my original notes from an early job. All that writing, all those words, as though I just had to use as many as possible whenever possible. It reminded me of my answer to a question asked in high school. What do you want to do, a friend asked. I want to write, I replied. And so I have.

Note that I didn’t say, I want to be a writer. I don’t think I’ve ever said that, or thought it. I’m not sure what it even means. I wanted to write. I wanted to get my ideas down on paper, explore them and develop them, see those sinuous strings of letters spreading across the page, coalescing into images I didn’t know I had in my head until I saw them in blue ink on white paper. Writing was like putting seeds into the ground so they’d grow into something bigger, something unanticipated but welcomed even if at first it made no sense to me.

When I look at the various mystery series I’ve written, I can see the stories I’ve used to interpret the experience of living along the New England coast, or in India during the tumult of the 1970s with Indira Gandhi, or on a farm in an isolated rural community. Some of the things I’ve said now surprise me. Did I really think that? How interesting! Each writer has different goals for any work in progress. My goals are always to discover something, see something emerge that I didn’t expect. For me, writing is like breathing. Necessary but something more.

What is it about the Great Lakes? by Karen Shughart

~ kshughart47 ~ 3 Comments

A book I read as a child, set in the 1950s on Lake Superior, resulted in a lifelong fascination with the Great Lakes.  I can’t remember the title, I wish I could, but I do remember snippets of it: family gatherings that included winter sports and summer outings; homemade ice cream made with snow and maple syrup; berry cobblers when the sun was warm and the days long and bright.

I grew up in a city about two hours from Lake Erie, and I have happy memories of family trips there: beaches, amusement parks, and many attractions you’d find at the ocean, but without the salt or sharks. We went to the Jersey shore on the Atlantic, too, and I loved it, but for some reason I always felt drawn to that lake. Many years later, I attended college in Buffalo, NY, and when the weather cooperated spent weekends at a beach cottage owned by family friends in nearby Fort Erie, Canada.

As fate would have it, about 20 years ago my husband and I decided one weekend to explore Lake Ontario, north of where we lived in Pennsylvania.  We discovered a tiny village through the internet; found a charming B&B with water views that was a short walk to the lake, the bay, a small but bustling business district, museums and restaurants, and a quick drive to Finger Lakes’ wineries. Two weeks later we bought our house.

We never expected to live here year ‘round, we planned to use the house as a getaway, but as time went by we were drawn to the region’s many charms.  We worked diligently to restore our house, it had been built by a lighthouse keeper more than a century ago and needed loving care. There’s mystique here: shipwrecks; sightings of massive lake creatures; British ships invading our village during the War of 1812; the transporting of runaway slaves to Canada; a rumor that a tunnel under our backyard hid some of those slaves before they fled. And the brisk business of rumrunning during Prohibition.

Each season has its own appeal. Summer months we revel in the resort vibe enjoying concerts, fireworks, outdoor movies, days spent beachcombing, shopping at farm stands, and lots of gatherings on our deck. During fierce winter storms we snuggle safely in our sturdy home, fireplace burning and soup on the stove, drinking wine with friends. Spring and fall are glorious, too, with acres of fruit trees in fragrant bloom or ripened apples hanging heavily at harvest, and a clean, sweet smell in the air.

In truth, our journey here was serendipitous, and we’ve never regretted it. Like the village on Lake Superior in the book I read so long ago, it’s an enchanting place filled with warm, kind people, and a peaceful quality of life.

From the time I was a child, immersed in Nancy Drew books, I wanted to write mysteries. One night several years ago, I dreamed the plot of my first Edmund DeCleryk cozy mystery, Murder in the Museum. Since then I’ve written three, published by Cozy Cat Press, all set on our lake with backstories that depict the history of this place we now call home. Writing has been a passion for me since I was young, but I never expected that someday my dream, coupled with a fascination with the Great Lakes, would become reality.

Keep It or Toss It?

~ susanoleksiw ~ 9 Comments

Like many other writers, I make a lot of notes and keep files on all sorts of things that I’m sure I’ll get to someday. But when the paper files start to spill out onto the floor or the desk, I know it’s time to cull the newspaper cuttings, scribbled notes for story ideas, and quotes from books that I was sure would prove useful or important.

This week I went through a three-ring binder where I’ve kept notes on the three series I’ve been working on beginning in 1991 and a few stand-alones that I never got to. Going through material I collected some years ago brought me back to ways I’d been thinking about writing—ideas for opening scenes or character sketches that no longer seemed strong or compelling. It was interesting to look over pages of ideas and see how much my thinking has changed. I was especially interested in how my ideas on craft had developed.

Included in all this were several ideas sketched out that meant nothing to me. I had no idea what I meant by some of it. So the question became, should I keep it or toss it? The answer was easier when I went through the news clippings that recorded peculiar people or bizarre incidents or twisted crimes. Most of them seemed blah to me now, so out they went. But one note was different.

I found a typed two-page single-spaced plot description for a thriller about a group of women who have been friends for years and sign up for an overseas tour. The tour is waylaid and the women and others held hostage. (Had I just read Bel Canto by Ann Patchett?) Hostages are killed, the police storm the site, and the women are saved. They head home and celebrate, glad to be alive. That seems like enough for a straightforward thriller, but the plot description goes on, covering the years after the women return to the States. 

This outline, neatly typed, stands out for its focus on plot, and the use of a story line that I had been thinking about over the years but never used. I couldn’t figure out a title, had named some of the characters, and wasn’t sure how to end it. That may be why it goes on for so long—because I couldn’t find a point of rest, of climax and recovery and ending. In some paragraph transitions it almost feels like I didn’t know where to stop or how to stop.

When I began this clearing-out I expected at most to find some of the story ideas I had set aside while I worked on other things, or at least some of the ideas that come when I wasn’t sure what I wanted to work on next. I like those because they get me thinking. They prime the pump, I suppose, and get the ideas flowing. 

But that typed outline is getting into my head. And now I have to figure out what I’m going to do with it. Write it or file it again? When other writers talk about writer’s block, I keep my mouth shut. It doesn’t happen for me. I have the other problem—way too many ideas to follow up on. And right now I have that big thriller idea, all neatly laid out for me to work on. As one of my friends in India used to say, What to do? What to do? Very great problem, madam.