Tag: writing

Happy New Year! or Bah, Humbug!

~ janispattersonmysteries ~ 2 Comments

by Janis Patterson

Somewhere it seems to have been written that the first post of a new year is supposed to be a joyous burst of ambition, resolve and anticipation about all the wonderful things the new year brings.


Humbug!


If you’re like me, the new year is startlingly if not exactly like the old year, but with the added stress of having to remember to change from 2024 to 2025 every time you have to write a date. The house is still messy, laundry has to be done, my daily word count has been ignored, meals have to be planned, cooked and cleaned up after… Plus, I’m tired. And fat. Between the gustatory excesses of Thanksgiving, assorted parties (including a family wedding), and the several days of Christmas gatherings and the pure physicality of extra cooking, shopping and gift wrapping – naturally all done with appropriate snacks and meals – I find myself wishing that the lovely clothes I received were all a size or two larger.


Of course, this too will pass. I will return to what I was before the holidays (and hopefully lose a little more!) and wear my new garments with pride, the house will get clean (okay, cleaner) and life will return to the occasionally bizarre standard we regard as normal.


After the final excesses of New Year’s Eve.


There was a time I went out on New Year’s Eve. Friends would have parties – I even gave a couple myself – or on rare occasions my escort of the minute and I would go clubbing, where at the stroke of midnight we would scream, kiss and hug anyone within reach, dodge a flood of balloons and sip champagne. Where did we get the energy?


This New Year’s Eve The Husband and I did what we usually do on New Year’s Eve – stay home in our jammies, eat a good meal (usually leftovers from December’s overwhelming bounty), sip either a good bottle of Veuve Clicquot (the best champagne ever!) or a mug or two of egg nog (usually virgin) and make a concentrated effort to stay awake until midnight, when we kiss and express our hopes for a better new year for us and for everyone. It doesn’t get better than that, folks. This year we actually stayed up after midnight – not because of any resolution or desire to see the New Year in or a result of our libations… You see, one of our local TV stations was running a Twilight Zone marathon…


Anyway, that is why this is a most untraditional post. I am not going to wax eloquent of the delights inherent in a fresh start, or how you really can keep a resolution to write X number of words every single day, or that you now are free to really work towards making the NYT list, or any such nonsense. That would be as ridiculous as telling you to buy a gym membership and actually keep your promise to go Every Single Day… (Does anyone ever really fulfill that resolution? Anywhere?)


Truth is, you can do any of that or any other kind of beginning any day of the year. Back in my youth there was a popular poster proclaiming Today Is The First Day Of The Rest Of Your Life. Kind of cheesy, but also very true. Every day is a new beginning.


Today is your new beginning. So will be tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. Enjoy each and every one of them, but use them wisely.


Happy New Year.

Prime the Pump and Take a Long Voyage

~ Janet Dawson ~ 6 Comments

It’s an old phrase: priming the pump. Back in the 19th century, it meant pouring liquid into a pump to expel the air and make it work. Even now, an internet search will tell us that before any centrifugal pump can be operated, it must be primed. Priming is the process of replacing air in the intake lines and portions of the pump with water.

But our subject is books and writing. Priming the pump also means encouraging the growth or action of something. In this case, my work-in-progress.

It’s a historical novel. I have a large pile of words that will eventually become a coherent first draft. Where the hell I’m going? How am I going to get there? Will it make any sense? It probably will, to me. Will anyone else want to read it?

Thus I prime the pump. I’ve been seeking inspiration in one of my research books, taking lots of notes. I’m paying attention to the timeline of actual events, in order to integrate my fictional characters into the crowded parade of real people who were doing things in my setting in 1878 and 1879. As I do this, I write notes to myself, usually set apart in brackets, outlining things I want my protagonist to do. Or learn.

There’s a lot going on, but it’s impossible—and improbable—for me to place her physically at all the significant events, much as I would like her to be an eyewitness. I must pick and choose the most dramatic scenes and figure out a logical reason for her to be there. The rest, she’ll have to learn from others. Besides, the book already looks like it will be long. Some events need to be mentioned in passing rather than detail.

So, reading a book, in this case, a research book. Or another book. Like this one. Years ago, I was going through a bad patch that soured me on life and left me feeling perpetually grim, grumpy, and depressed. A friend tossed me a lifeline, a book. It’s Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy, by Sarah Ban Breathnach.

I’m not one for touchy-feely, self-help books. Over the years, I’ve bought a few, gotten little from them, and quickly donated them, passing them on to other readers. But Simple Abundance spoke to me at a time when I needed it. It’s a collection of essays, one for each day of the year, looking at things like joy, gratitude, beauty, and so forth. I read one essay every morning. I’m always surprised and gratified when the essay for a particular day speaks to something that’s going on in my life. Such as the day my father died. That essay was exactly what I needed at the time.

One of the best takeaways is the gratitude journal. Each evening, I jot down three or more things that I’m grateful for—even if it just clean sheets on my bed, a quiet day at home, and especially a productive day of writing. I find that keeping the gratitude journal has changed the way I look at life. That helps immeasurably with my writing.

Simple Abundance also introduced me to the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy. On a date at the end of the year, the author quotes Cavafy’s poem Ithaka. During my trip to Greece in October 2023, my group visited the ancient theatre of Epidaurus, constructed in the late fourth century BCE. It’s considered the most perfect ancient Greet theatre with regard to acoustics and aesthetics. It is still used for the performances of ancient plays.

Our tour guide demonstrated the acoustics at Epidaurus by standing in the middle and reading a poem—Cavafy’s Ithaka. As we enter the new year, I leave you a few lines from the poem [translation by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, C. P. Cavafy/Collected Poems, Princeton University Press, 1992.]

As you set out for Ithaka

hope the voyage is a long one,

full of adventure, full of discovery.

. . . .

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.

Arriving there is what you are destined for.

But do not hurry the journey at all.

Better if it lasts for years . . .

May your voyage this year be long, full of adventure and discovery. And productive!

Endings

~ susanoleksiw ~ 3 Comments

Beginnings and endings are the hardest part of writing for me. (That’s today. On other days it’s the muddled middle.) Some writers have arresting, captivating openings that grab the reader and carry her along into a ninety-thousand-word novel. I’m not one of those, but I can eventually get a few words on the page to get the story moving. For me the greater challenge is endings.

Some years ago I listened to Andre Dubus III talk about his new book, House of Sand and Fog, which led him to talk about how he’d grown as a writer. He didn’t like his first book, Bluesman, because he considered it sentimental. His disdain for this failure in craft was obvious, and when I met him at a writers’ event years later, the subject came up again. As I listened to him touch on the challenges in his work, I understood that for him an ending that is sentimental is also in some ways dishonest, an inability to reach deeper for something that was true. I had just purchased TheGarden of Last Days, and read it with that in mind. There is nothing sentimental in that book, least of all in the ending.

Several critics have explored the link between the traditional and cozy mystery and comedy; noir crime fiction has been linked to tragedy. At the end of the cozy mystery, the world is set right again; the villain has been identified and brought to justice of some sort; the lesser crimes of other characters are brought to light and justice is visited on them in various ways, perhaps public censure or shame or remorse; and the minor romance barely acknowledged sometimes comes to light and there is a new beginning for a young couple. All is right with the world. From Restoration Comedy to Agatha Christie and writers today, it is hard for a reader of cozies or traditional mysteries to be satisfied with less. An unrequited love or an unchallenged con artist will annoy some readers as much as a dangling participle will menace the peace of mind of a copy editor. And I understand this. There is something deeply satisfying about the comedic ending, a moment that reassures us that the world aslant can be righted, that our inchoate ideals can be realized.

So how does a writer of traditional crime fiction compose an ending that is both true to the story being told and unsentimental? Sometimes I think this question is just one more obstacle to writing a satisfactory ending, and all I’m doing is complicating matters, making life harder for myself. I’m not unsatisfied with the ending of Family Album, the third in the Mellingham series, but I acknowledge that it is a tad sentimental (maybe more than a tad). But readers loved it because it fulfilled one of the hints at the beginning of the story, and a promise fulfilled, particularly about a possible romance, always brings a frisson of delight. But it was sentimental. At least it wasn’t mawkish.

I don’t remember most of the endings in my books and stories but some stand out, for me at least. The ending of When Krishna Calls in the Anita Ray series required research, rethinking, and stepping back. A woman sentenced to prison looks out on her new world, listening to another prisoner, and is satisfied with the choices she has made. She won’t forget why she is where she is, and she won’t regret it. The ending of Friends and Enemies in the Mellingham series required several versions before I finally landed on the one that worked and fit with the rest of the story. An editor who read the ms and considered acquiring it mentioned how much she liked it (but not enough to take the book). Another ending that satisfied me is that in “Coda for a Love Affair,” in Devil’s Snare: Best New England Crime Stories 2024. The ending is simple, clear as cut glass and sharp.

Endings are hard because the easy ones come fast, are easy to write, and sit well on the page. And that’s the problem. They tempt us to take them, give a sigh of relief, and pat ourselves on the back for coming up with (rather than running carelessly into what looks like) the perfect line or paragraph to close out three hundred pages. Depending on how tired we are of the story and working on it, that ending will appear reasonable, acceptable, or a gift from the writing gods. So this is where I step back and wonder what Andre might think. I don’t have to get far into that mental exercise to admit that the first or even the thirtieth ending is not what I want. 

If nothing else, writing keeps us humble. In our heads we hear perfect dialogue, snatches of prose so brilliant we’ll never need the sun again, but on the page, our pen does not cooperate (or the computer keyboard), and we end up with the mundane, the ordinary, the usual. I keep working on endings but I know I fall short most of the time. As do we all. It’s encouraging to know that greater writers have the same struggles, the same challenges, the same doubts. With one eye on writers whom I admire, I keep at my own work, striving to meet my standards even if that means sometimes disappointing some readers. If I want better endings, I just have to keep at it until I get there.

That Pesky Creative Gene

~ lanamfox ~ 3 Comments

Every year about November, my creative gene kicks in. Why it doesn’t start sooner, I have no idea, but it waits until a month before Christmas and decides it really wants me to create something besides stories. It wants me to draw, paint, sew or knit Christmas gifts.

Sometimes, I give into it and try to create something amazing for my family or friends for the holidays. Often, I never finish these projects, instead I scrap them for the next year. Then that pesky creative gene doesn’t come around again until the next November!

I will admit that I’m not artistic even though I’d love to be, nor can I do much on the knitting side besides knit and purl. A few years ago, I decided to make slippers for all of the girls in the family. I bought a book with great patterns in it. That’s as far as I got. It’s a start, right? I can make quilts, but I’m slow at it, so there is no way I can get one done between November and December 25th.

But the story ideas abound. They are always rattling around in my brain. Some stick, some don’t, but they keep coming. The busier I am—and we all know how busy it is around the holidays—the faster the ideas pop into my head. I want to write them all.

So, how do I pick one idea and run with it? Especially when I’m already working on a novel that needs to be finished by the first of the year.

I keep an idea journal. I jot down everything I can think of about the latest story idea that has turned on its lightbulb in my brain. Once I write them down, they usually quit bugging me. But sometimes they won’t stop, and I know that one needs to be brought to life in a book or short story. I guess if they stand the test of time, they will eventually be made into a story.

At a recent book signing, a man came up to me and said, “I just had to share this with you. There have been so many things happening in my family that I should write about. There have been murders, which were never solved, people disappearing that have never been found, all kinds of things.”

I told him that he should write about it, and he smiled and said, “I really should.” Then he waved a hand in the air and hurried off.

Later, after I had a moment to think about it, I wondered why he’d been so eager to tell me about all of the bad things that had happened in his family. Was he the nice guy he seemed to be? Or…my mystery writer’s mind could come up with a lot of ways to fill in the blanks and a seed of an idea for another book popped into my head.

I’m so in awe of writers who can write multiple books a year. I can barely write one. How do they do it? Am I not organized enough? Am I not persistent enough? Does my brain only work a couple hours a day and then go on hiatus?

Every year I tell myself I’m going to crank out at least two books this year. This is the year that the stars will align, and the words will flow. But it doesn’t happen. I’m still slow. Still pulled away by the other parts of my life that take me away from writing.

I read recently where a famous Indy author just published her forty-sixth book. She started in 2017. I did the math; that’s almost seven books a year.

I know what you’re all thinking. Everyone is different. All writers go at their own pace, and we shouldn’t compare ourselves to other writers. You’re right, but it would be nice if that pesky creative gene would kick in in January instead of November and let me get more writing done.

I know that to write more books a year, I need to forget about knitting, sewing, crafting, painting, or drawing, which we’ve already established I’m not that great at, and just write.

I think this year I’ll change my calendar to November on January 1st. I’ll put autumn decorations up around the house and trick myself into thinking it’s fall and maybe my creative gene will buy it and kick in. One can always hope. In the meantime, if you have any helpful ideas for a busy procrastinator, please send them my way!

Merry Christmas!

Lana

Jobs, Responsibilities and Big Girl Panties

~ janispattersonmysteries ~ 3 Comments


by Janis Patterson

Hope all of you had a wonderful and calorie-filled Thanksgiving! Ours was quiet and simply splendid. I even took a week off from writing… from the computer itself. No email, no games… and my kitchen has never been so clean! We had a lovely and incredibly delicious dinner at my sister-in-law’s with my mother-in-law and aunt-in-law and a lazy afternoon of conversation and multiple desserts. God did indeed bless me with my in-law family, and I am intensely grateful because mine is pretty much all gone. (Now if He could just make holiday calories not stick to my ribs and other portions of my anatomy…)

Anyway, back to the business of writing! During my computer hiatus I did a lot of thinking and enjoying old memories and a long holiday phone conversation (normally I loathe telephones, much prefer email) with a friend of many years. She is a gifted and somewhat well-known actress in regional theatre, now semi-retired, and as we talked for some reason my memory dredged up another conversation from a number of years ago. I had just submitted a book right on deadline (I always prefer to be early) which had probably been the hardest, most miserable writing experience I had ever had. The book just didn’t gel, I could not deal with the characters, the plot that had seemed so perfect (and which worked well on paper but not in execution) just didn’t work… and I had a deadline. Deadlines are great motivators, and I got the book done.

How, my friend asked in wonder, had I managed to do that? How could I create without an overwhelming inspiration?

It was my turn to wonder. After all the performances she had done, the plays she had appeared in, the various roles she had created, I asked, had she never done one on technique alone?

She said no… not, at least, the entire part. Some performances she had started on technique alone, but she swore that once it had gotten running it the inspiration had clicked in. Some times, she confessed, she had let her understudy play the part because she simply could not summon the involvement she had to have.

I don’t understand that kind of thinking. If one is a professional one gets the job done. One doesn’t have to wait for a mental green light or an overwhelming ‘feeling’.

She did not appreciate that sentiment when I expressed it to her by simply saying I was a professional. Writing is a job. While it is wonderful when it happens, one does not need inspiration to do a job. You just sit down, put on your big girl panties and start writing. Put one word after another. It doesn’t make any difference if you have to change them later, you are writing. You are doing your job.

The best piece of writing advice I ever heard was said by the wildly successful Nora Roberts. “Write the book, even if it’s garbage. You can fix garbage. You can’t fix a blank page.”

In other words, be a professional. If you’re a writer, you write. You don’t wait for inspiration or magical insight or anything else. You do your job and you write.