Tag: writing

Experience vs Research

~ janispattersonmysteries ~ 4 Comments


by Janis Patterson

I’ll admit it – I’m a travel junkie. So is The Husband. We love to fill our bags, I grab my travel computer (an aged MacBookAir) and then we head off. I’ve gotten several books from my various trips and many more ideas than I can ever use. (Plus, to be honest, a lot of fun and a few downright scary moments…) Being older, we’re trying to squeeze in as much travel as we can afford before it becomes physically unfeasible. Travel is one of the greatest gifts life can offer. It is not a guaranteed gateway to a career.


I really did think everyone sort of thought the same way, but not long ago someone whom up until then I had thought intelligent gave me a rather unpleasant shock. Now you know because I have written again and again I believe there are ideas everywhere – you can get more workable ideas in a couple of days than a dozen writers could work up in a dozen lifetimes. I still believe that, which is why I was absolutely gobsmacked when this person said they really planned on becoming a novelist but they couldn’t start until they had more money to travel with.


This happened at a speaking venue where – among other things – I talked about the research value of travel. After my presentation was over there was a reception, and this person came to talk to me and dropped his bomb about not being able to write until he could afford to travel. Of course I questioned the idea that one had to travel to write novels. He became very defensive and said he didn’t want to be limited to writing only about what he knew, because all he knew was domestic and boring and in his opinion not worthy of his time, talent or effort. He didn’t think it was fair that established writers should have such a prejudicial leg up.


Sorry to burst anyone’s bubble, but I am not always sweet and well-mannered, especially when I am irritated and this person’s somewhat belligerently skewed vision definitely irritated me.


So, I asked, if you haven’t been to a place you can’t write about it? (Now I am not stupid; there are innumerable advantages to actually having been to a place – I just don’t believe it is an absolute requirement.)


He said yes.


I then asked how he thought people wrote historical novels, as time travel machines are pretty rare on the ground. Or sci-fi. Or high fantasy, since I hadn’t seen any dragons zipping around lately either.


Now he was getting angry, saying I was just clouding the issue and trying to discourage him and, he accused, like other multi-published professional writers keep the market for myself. He was an adventure writer, he declared, one who wrote about exotic places and cultures – not a ‘kitchen sink’ drone. He was special and he’d prove it once he could get started.


The rest of the conversation, I am somewhat sad to say, was too intense and impolite for recording here. However, it did make me think… and grieve for those who agree with him. I have always and will always say that research is essential; you have to write about what you know, and if you don’t know about it when you start you should know a great deal about it before you finish – whatever ‘it’ is. However, that does not mean you have to personally experience it! Sometimes that is indeed preferable, sometimes it is just pleasurable, sometimes it is impossible. (At least until they start tourist runs to 1860 or Alpha Centauri.)


If personal, on-the-spot research is impossible and there are no research facts are available, what’s a writer to do? My answer is logical extrapolation. If you’re writing about a space colony with a mixed alien population, you should think about physical makeup, reactions to varying gravitational pulls, breathing (oxygen or methane, for example), eating (fat/carbohydrate vs silicon/mineral sustenance) and the like. Now I know this is far from the world of terrestrial, ‘normal’ mysteries, about which there is thankfully an abundance of research available, but the principle is the same.


You have to know what you’re writing about whether you already know it, research it, create it, experience it or learn it. You are creating a world and in some worlds what you say goes – but once you have said it, it must stay the same for the length of time you are in that world. Even ‘playing God’ as writers do albeit on a limited basis, there are still rules.
In a nutshell, research is necessary; personal experience is not.


I don’t know what happened to that deluded young would-be writer; I do hope he absorbed and accepted what I told him – though I fear not, at least not now. Perhaps the writing-fairy lightning will strike him and he will have his beliefs validated – doubtful, but it does happen very very very rarely.


All I know is that we made a deposit on a great trip the other day and I’m already thinking about what to take and make sure my traveling computer is up to date and ready to go. Even though it’s early, I’ll start as soon as I finish the current project, which is set in ‘today’ and just down the street. No travel needed.

And… just in case you’re interested, all four volumes of my newest release – 50 BLOGS ON WRITING AND THE WRITING LIFE – are available at Amazon for just $.99 each!

Reading Old Work

~ susanoleksiw ~ 9 Comments

For the last few weeks I’ve been thinking about the old mss left unfinished. Some are in my computer. Some of them are on paper, stacked in a closet, shoved into the back where I can’t see them. That’s probably a good thing because if they were visible I’d pull them out and litter my desk with them.

There’s nothing wrong with any one of them, and several came very close to a sale. But there is something not quite right. Every writer knows what I’m talking about—the story we loved and worked on and with a gasp of hope sent off to an editor or an agent. And then it sat there, on someone’s computer or desk, gathering dust of being pushed lower and lower on the list of titles in the TBR file. The question becomes, what do we do with them? Do we reread and rework them? That’s a definite possibility. The more I learn, the more I rethink what I’ve done and recognize where I could have improved the story by changing the setting, developing the villain more, heightening the tension, or removing the extra secondary characters. But I don’t do these things in a novel. I might do some in a short story, but not in a longer work. And I think I know why.

Some years ago I was an avid fan of Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion mysteries. The first one appeared in 1929, The Crime at Black Dudley, and others followed fairly regularly into the 1960s. I don’t know if many people read her work anymore, but she was considered one of the great British mystery writers of her time. After reading through her entire list including a couple of novellas, I came across her first mystery, The White Cottage Mystery, published in 1928. This is only a year before her first Albert Campion story. And I was startled at the difference between the two., and the extent of her growth and development as a writer between her first and her second book. It’s an experience I have always remembered. 

We grow and change as writers. If our work sounds the same year after year, we’re not growing and it’s time to stop and ask why. I don’t want to write the same book year after year. There has to be something different, some sign of a new perspective, a new challenge. I can see this same ambition in some of the writers I read, but not in others. 

When I pulled out some of my old mss and had the passing thought of rewriting and updating them, I was frozen, and here I think I was so for a good reason. Whoever I was back then I am not her now. To bring one of those old mss up to the level I would want to write today would be to dismantle and basically erase it. Each line, each feeling and action would have to be different because I’m different. The story was good for its time and in some instances that’s twenty or more years ago. I was different and the world was different.

I’m in a long phase of decluttering the house I’ve lived in for over forty years, but I doubt I’ll toss out those mss, not just yet. Each one tells me something about writing, finding a voice, developing a voice through time, challenging ideas and creating new ones. I liked some of those stories more than others, and the failure of some weighed on me more than others, but like any other experience that comes to an end, I let those novels go and moved on.

The one important thing I remember is that even though they didn’t sell, they made me the writer I am today, with their lessons and discoveries, their pitfalls and graces. For that alone I will probably keep them for a while longer.

Hold, Enough!

~ janispattersonmysteries ~ 4 Comments

by Janis Patterson


The cry ‘Hold, Enough!’ comes from a quote from Macbeth (or as stage people call it, The Scottish Play) which I can drag only as a paraphrase from my memory – “Lay on, MacDuff, and curst be he that first cries, “Hold, Enough!””


So why am I writing about The Scottish Play?


Because I have cried, ‘Hold, Enough.’


As writers we soon become accustomed to playing God. We can, as P. D . James so famously said, ‘kill with a glance and leave the body lying right there on the page.’ We can create towns, people, populations, even worlds to our own specifications. Want to change it? Toss in a hurricane or a plague, or just toss the whole thing and start over. The only rules in our writing are the ones we set for ourselves.


Sounds perfect, doesn’t it? In many ways it is. Unfortunately, though, sometimes such an arrogant attitude seeps into real life. We forget we can’t change the timeline, or change the cast of characters, or eradicate anything that annoys us. (Well, we can, but it can be illegal, to say nothing of quite messy.)


We write in a world of endless possibilities and power. We live in a world of concrete limitations and restrictions. No wonder writers are both frustrated and a little testy.


So what brings on this rant? Once again I have been brought up short by the constraints of reality. Time is a constant. Energy is entropic. We can’t have/do everything we want.


When I am presented with a project that excites me it doesn’t really matter what I have on my plate already. Of course I can squeeze it in. If I do X number of words a day it will be easy…


Well, not always. Maybe I am just getting older, or slower, or just choosier – or more disinterested – but I find myself getting more interested in luxuries like sleeping, cooking something that doesn’t have air fryer directions on the box, spending quality time with friends and family… The tipping point might have been when I could not make my hot tub exercise time and my poor arthritic joints went into rebellion, so I joined them and revolted.


I still make my word count… most days… but the cost is higher. More contracts equal more projects equal more demands on my time… and the bitter knowledge that the problem is all my fault. I took on the projects. I signed the contracts. It’s like being in front of the largest candy counter in the world – I’ll take two of those, and a half dozen of those, and a pound of those… all the while you know you should be eating sensibly. You want, but you know you can’t have. At least, not everything.


So I did something I have only done once before in my life. I cried “Hold, Enough!”


After a dispassionate analysis I bought back one of my contracts. Now I only have two projects, both partially completed and fairly short, due before the end of the year. And they truly will be easy.


Yesterday I wrote only half a day; I did make my word count easily enough, then ‘frittered’ (as I once would have called it) the afternoon away making a holiday Rumtoph. The kitchen is redolent with the scents of fruits and the enticing aroma of rum. It should be ready to use in about six weeks, when I will bake some holiday cakes. It is a heady prospect in more ways than one.


Life without writing is unthinkable, but life with writing has to be balanced.

Punctuation

~ susanoleksiw ~ 10 Comments

I’m a fan of punctuation. It’s not something I thought much about in my earlier years, except when a teacher told me I was using commas incorrectly. For my next paper I made sure to use commas as correctly as I could manage. Her response was, “It looks like you sprinkled them like salt.” This did not mar my love of all those black marks on the page also known as letters and punctuation marks, but I did grow skeptical of her instructional skills. 
 
When I arrived in graduate school and stared down at a passage composed in Sanskrit and printed in Devanagari (the script usually associated with that language) at the end of the first semester, I came to appreciate those little marks even more. Not all languages use them, and not even Western languages used them until the medieval period. Until then most paragraphs looked like this.
 
Wordswerewrittenallbunchedtogetherwithnoindicationofwheretoputastoporcommaorquestionmarkthatwouldmakesenseifweallreadwordsthesamewayitwouldntmatterwhatwasmissingbecausetherewouldbenodisagreementwheresomethingendsorbeginswouldbedeterminedtobethesamebyallreadersbutwouldthatbethecaseiftherewerenomarkertoshowwouldweknowhowotherreaderswereinterpretingaparticularpassagecouldbereadinanynumberofways
 
Now consider reading passages like this in a foreign language and a different script. Why am I thinking about all of this?
 
My partners and I have just finished editing and setting the new anthology from Crime Spell Books this year titled Devil’s Snare. One of them remarked that there were a lot of dashes and ellipses in this year’s crop of stories. We agreed that was so. But why?
 
In general most writers understand the correct use of the comma, colon, semicolon, period, quotation marks, question mark, and exclamation point. We know the basic purpose of the dash and the ellipses. I for one blame Emily Dickinson for the overuse of the dash. If she hadn’t been such an inspired poet, that particular mark might have faded into disuse. As it is, it’s at least as popular as the ellipsis. Why do I care?
 
I’m not sure that I do care about these marks. I use them but not nearly as often as many other writers I read. What I do care about is the reading experience. These two marks are so ubiquitous that I finally had to wonder why, and I think I have an answer. 
 
When I read I form a picture of the characters going about their actions in the setting given. I hear them speaking, usually in a manner that conforms to my image of them. If the writer is a good one, my imagination is stimulated and those characters are robust, filling my head. I hear the intonation that tells me Stella is annoyed, hinted by the way the author has described her posture and glance. When the little boy is frightened by the store owner on his first attempt at shoplifting, showing off to his friends, I can hear him stutter, pause, unsure whether he should go on or go quiet or get out as fast as he can. But sometimes my imaginings of the characters’ doings are interrupted by the text. The author wants me to hear an interruption, and ends a sentence with a dash, just so I’ll be sure to notice that the character is interrupted. And if the character should pause to reflect, the author uses an ellipsis to make sure I know the character is pausing, unsure what to say next. But why do this? Doesn’t the writer trust the reader’s imagination?
 
At this point I don’t think the writer is thinking about the reader. I think he or she is thinking about how this scene looks on a stage, in front of a camera. I think he or she has slipped into writing stage directions in the prose text for the actors. The writer is telling the actors how to interpret the scene, and the reader who has imagined something that seems rich and satisfying comes to a series of these doctored lines and the imagination is blunted. It comes to a halt. Clunk.
 
There is a valid use for both marks, but I see it less and less often. When I’m tempted to use one or the other, I take that as a hint from the writing unconscious that I may be getting lazy and it’s time to rework the sentence or the scene. I don’t want to do anything to hinder a reader’s imagination.
 
Perhaps I’m being irked by overuse, so in the interests of fairness I pulled out a copy of The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. The Great Man uses dashes and ellipses, not with abandon, but with care and precision. Hammett was too good a writer to get lazy in the middle of a scene; he could rely on his characters getting across how they felt, what they were doing, and why. I doubt he was thinking about his books being turned into movies, or how a particular actor would interpret a particular scene. (Yes, I know, I could be wrong.)
 
I have finally reached the point where I want to eliminate every ellipsis I encounter, and slip back into my own imagining of the story and its characters. And this may well become my policy as an editor.

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.