Showing posts with label Below the Tree Line. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Below the Tree Line. Show all posts

Friday, February 18, 2022

Picking up on Hints

One of my steps in revising the already partly revised first draft is to catch all the hints and suggestions for ideas to develop that linger in the text. These usually are ideas that could have been developed and taken the story in a different direction, or hints for clues to be planted or red herrings to be dragged through the next twenty scenes that were never used. They have all been rejected if not consciously then de facto. I catch them as I read through, and usually don't think about them again. In any story the options are many before we begin writing, but with each scene they are narrowed. 

In my current WIP, however, I've taken them more seriously as astute suggestions from my unconscious, and not to be ignored. As a result of thinking about them harder, I've solved some problems that I was lazily going to just read past (until the final draft, of course, one of my bad habits). Ginny Means, a social worker whose caseload focuses on teenage girls in foster homes, has already appeared in two short stories in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, with a third in the pipeline. The one hint I grappled with the hardest is the idea of giving Ginny a rescue dog.

In Below the Tree Line, Felicity O'Brien is given a rescue dog after she finds signs of someone getting too close to her barn and house late at night. Virtually every farm has a dog, and here was my main character, owner of a farm, without one. Writing one in was easy, and I enjoyed getting to know Shadow, a little black-haired mutt.

 

In my current WIP I thought the idea of a dog seemed too cliched, since the main character was a single woman who worked, so when I scribbled the line in the first few chapters that Ginny fostered dogs occasionally, I thought I'd just leave it like that. There wasn't really any reason to develop this, so I let it just sit there while I focused on the plot and other characters. 

 

As I kept going I had the usual plot holes to fill, motivations to figure out, and details about her life to clarify. In one instance the presence of a dog could be a crucial clue, and I thought about giving her one of her own. But that posed other issues. She needed to be someone who could roam late into the night without worrying about a dog in the back seat barking loudly at shadows or others in a passing car or walking along on a leash on the sidewalk. But Ginny also had to be seen as compassion outside of her work as well. The idea of the fostered dog reappeared, and once I began to look at this more seriously, I could see all sorts of possibilities for her character as well as another pivotal figure. 

 

I was slightly worried that I was creating another character who had to be seen in part as a villain who had some good qualities. He felt like a cliche and I wasn't sure how to deal with this. I didn't want it to be easy for the reader to dislike him, so somehow he had to be shown to be a decent guy. He got a dog, and Ginny was sympathetic. The foster dog was in.

 

When I talk about writing as a process of discovery I'm usually thinking about the personalities and quirks of specific figures in the story, their appearance and family relationships. I'm not thinking about dogs determining clues and character, but that's what happened in this WIP. Giving Ginny a foster dog to care for occasionally doesn't change other aspects of her life given in previously published short stories, and remains a feature I can use or not depending on the plot. Those hints and suggestions I usually eliminate have turned out to be important sign posts in this WIP and I'm reading them more carefully now. 

 

 

Thursday, June 18, 2020

Story Ideas from Readers

Well before the lockdown, social distancing, and masks (which make it hard to hear conversations at other tables in a restaurant), I listened to two women talk about a circumstance that seemed ordinary until one said, "Can you imagine if . . . " With those simple words, she flipped over the situation and I saw a story.

This is how stories come to me, when I'm listening to someone else talk, or reading an article that holds a twist that isn't meant to be one. The Boston Globe regularly revisits the theft of art at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, a stain on our Yankee preserve that shows no sign of being removed. The story included a note on the brief interview some years earlier with one of the guards who lived very modestly in another state. Pressed with the old news that some wondered if he'd been involved, he replied, "Would I be living like this if I had been?" 

Once in a while a reader will ask a question that opens up a possibility I hadn't thought of. At a mystery conference in England a fan of the Mellingham series featuring Chief of Police Joe Silva wanted to know about Joe's family. She asked about what I was holding back from readers. She was convinced there was a secret in Joe's life because I never said much about his family. The details were scant--a Portuguese son in a large family who had fished with his father and brothers during his earlier years. His parents were alive, and he spoke to his mother regularly (as did his landlady). That was about it.

Unlike many other writers, I never did a full backstory on the main character of my series. I knew who I wanted him to be but I didn't flesh out a lot of detail about his life before he became a cop and was hired by the town of Mellingham. But her question startled me. She had read closely, she had questions, she wanted answers. I thought about her for years until an idea came to me. The result was Last Call for Justice, when Joe drives south of Boston for a family reunion that his elderly father has insisted on. The old man is convinced he has one last chance to see all his children before death comes for him, and he draws them all home. It is a story of old fears and grudges, a settling of scores, and a discovery no one wants to make.

My new series features Felicity O'Brien, a farmer who has inherited the ability to heal with her hands, a gift passed down from mother to daughter through several generations. Her gift is on display in the first book, Below the Tree Line, but plays only a small role. One editor wanted more of that part of Felicity's life, and another wanted less. In the second book in the series (now under consideration), the healing plays an important role, but in the third book, which is now taking shape, Felicity's ability to read through her hands a person's state of health plays a pivotal role. 

The difference between an acquaintance offering a story line they just know would make a good novel and a question from a reader is obvious to me. The engagement with the series means the reader is thinking about who these characters are and what they would do, how they would engage the world. They can see what I've left out, and are curious about the missing backstory, or they catch on to an inkling I've had but haven't wanted to develop just yet. I'm grateful for these kinds of reactions from readers, and look forward to them. They always lead to a good idea.

Thursday, July 18, 2019

Advice, the Long and the Short of It

By the time one of us publishes a novel, we’ve been fortunate enough to receive a fair amount of feedback from other readers and writers. Sometimes this advice takes the form of extensive, detailed notes, and at other times it’s a general reaction of liking or disliking the story or how it’s told. An early reader of my first mystery, Murder in Mellingham, said simply, “Could we get to the dirty deed sooner?” As an editor, she knew that merely moving up the murder would require a lot of other changes, all of which would improve the story.

Another of my first critiquers, Jim Huang, gave me several pages of single-spaced, typed comments. Yes, I was intimidated, but it was an enormous help. He gave me a lot to read and ponder, specific passages to rework or excise, and questions to answer. But one comment that I’ll never forget was ultra simple. “What’s this scene doing here?” Apparently, nothing useful.

Over the years I’ve learned to expect certain reactions from certain readers, and I look forward to those because I know they’ll put me on the right path and save me a lot of embarrassment. One friend can deliver the most important message in the shortest sentence. She once said, “It isn’t finished.” This stopped me in my tracks because, of course, I thought it was, as did several other readers. But I trusted her, so I thought about her comment at length, and she was right.

In Below the Tree Line, I was dealing with a new setting and new characters. Several Beta readers talked about the plot, when certain scenes should be beefed up or a character fleshed out. All of this was useful, but the best comment, at least for me, came from one reader in particular. The story revolves around Felicity O’Brien, who has recently taken over the family farm now that her father is too frail to do the work himself. She knows this land, has grown up here and worked the farm, all of which rests in the background. Then a friend said, “What is her life really like?” Out of that question grew an understanding of the role of the farming background. This had to be more than window dressing, a pretty landscape. I thought I knew this, but the reader’s comment indicated that I had failed to convey it well. Out of her comment came a change in how Felicity spent her days with an intent of showing the obvious to those who might know nothing about farms.

The more short stories or novels I write, the better I become as a writer, but also the more I understand that the length of the critique doesn’t matter. Sometimes the shortest critique contains the single idea that I need most. The fault in a story can usually be distilled into a few words, and understanding this can open up a raft of possibilities. As I choose one, I eliminate one problem but I may encounter others. Thinking about this reminds me of something Walter Mosley said during a talk at Crime Bake 2018. He said he knew a manuscript was finished when he identified a problem he couldn’t fix. But it was something he could get right in the next book.

Like many other writers, I usually want to make one more pass through the manuscript, but that isn’t always necessary. Sometimes the story really is complete. Being told when to stop is also an important comment from a reader.

Friday, April 5, 2019

Naming Characters

 
Revising my current work-in-progress requires one or two new characters, so I’m trying to come up with names that suit their role and personality. This is a task that is both fun and important. The wrong name can make the character feel like a misfire in the story, and throw off the reader.

Some years ago I submitted a manuscript to an editor I knew who had accepted other work from me, and when she returned it she pointed out that all the character names began with the letter P. Until she wrote that, I hadn’t noticed. How had I missed that? I was clearly in a rut.

Over the years I’ve tried whatever name comes to mind, which is what often leads to characters with the same initial letter, the same cultural background, or names so similar that they confuse the reader. Then I tried a couple of name generators, but they tended to produce names all from the world of WASPs.

Like any writer I have various print resources, including a book that brags it has 15,000 baby names organized by language, ethnicity, gender, and including definitions and some famous individuals by them. Reading through these lists can be fun and distracting, and not always productive.

Did you know that Mhairie, Scottish from the Hebrew Miryam, means “bitterness,” “rebellion,” and “wished-for child.” The last definition is lovely, but a child carrying the first one could resent her parents mightily. Dyami means “eagle” in a Native American language, and would perhaps carry the child to great heights.

Most of these techniques or devices didn’t satisfy me. When I used what I thought was an easy to accept but unusual name, one of my Beta readers struggled with it, so out it went. And yet I see more and more in print names that I’ve never encountered before and whose origins I can't begin to identify—a sign of our expanding world and cultural environment but one that doesn’t really help me.

Instead of looking around me for the perfect name I’ve taken a closer look at the character and tried to get a name that seems to speak about who he or she is. Hence the main character in the first book of my new series, Felicity O’Brien, is both Irish and endowed with happiness and occasionally bliss, but also with a love of knowing. She is the daughter of women who also bore unusual names that spoke to their character. Her mother, Charity, is shown to have an especially generous heart in the first book. Not every character has an unusual name, but I enjoyed calling the owner of the local sawmill Dingel Mantell, and his daughter Padma. 

Names that were once common seem unusual to us now, even idiosyncratic and peculiar, and among these I often find just the right one for a particular character. This is a task in the writing of a novel or short story that seems obstructive when I want to get writing, but in the end I generally feel so comfortable with the person I've uncovered with the appropriate name that I count the time well spent.