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. 

 

 

Graphomania?

Over the years I've subscribed to probably hundreds of websites, but only a few have survived my decluttering process. One of these is wordsmith.org, and its A.Word.A.Day. I enjoy the etymology of rarely used words, and especially of those that are arcane. But today's word caught my attention more than most. Graphomania isn't rare, but the description was a little different from what I expected. 

Image by Nile from Pixabay

The definition, "an obsessive inclination to write," seems obvious from the term's construction (graph + mania), but the description after that seemed less so. After describing Leonardo da Vinci's passion for filling thousands of pages in his notebooks, the editor added this:

 

Do you carry a notebook and pen with you at all times? Do you wake up in the middle of the night to write? 

 

And my first thought was, Doesn't everyone? I know the answer to that is no. I know not everyone carries a notebook or wakes up in the middle of the night to jot down a good idea for a story or a perfect line for a certain character. My desk is littered with scraps of paper for story ideas, scenes to add to my WIP, a pad of paper filled with notes that will remain with the printed ms after I'm truly finished, and stacks of notecards that I add to as I go along in the story. But does this mean I'm really a graphomaniac?

 

Once in a while I stop to wonder how it was that I knew as a teenager that writing was my life. I don't wonder too hard because I'm honest about this—beyond the question is the recognition that I felt early on the compulsion to write. I was never someone who "wanted" to write. I was someone who wrote, made up stories, reworked them, and wrote more. I sent them out and, sadly, they came back, but that didn't matter too much. I just wrote more and sent out more. I also learned early on to be careful about uninvited commentary from anyone, since most people think young ones should have a practical career in mind. I ignored them because I knew, beneath it all, writing was a compulsion and the wise response was to give in and work at it.

 

In India I often spent time with a British couple. The husband was an artist whose work, small sculptures, funded their annual trips to India and other countries. His wife asked me one day why I wrote. I was about to launch into some explanation about liking mysteries, or whatever, when I stopped and said, "It's a compulsion. I just have to." Her husband nodded and said, "Yes, exactly."

 

The reader who occasionally asks the writer why she does what she does probably wants to hear something grander than "It's a compulsion," but that is the truth. I would be miserable if I didn't write, and so would most of the other writers I know. So which is better? Graphomaniac or compulsive? I don't really like either one, so I'll just jot that question down in my notebook as something to think about. How about you? Do you have a preference?

 

Authenticity in Fiction

I've been thinking about the details used in historical novels to create a sense of time and place a sense of authenticity. The 1950s seems to be an increasingly popular period, but it is the period of my childhood so I look for the details that tell me this is in fact written by someone who understands the period and pulls out the just-right details. 

 

We lived near the ocean and much of my early life involved heading to the beach, sailing with my family, or hiking in the nearby woods. Just about anyone who could get to the water had some kind of boat, and sailing out of the harbor meant waving to a wide variety of ocean goers. Managing movement on the water is a great leveler—the fanciest boat in the world means nothing with a poor skipper. This is still true.

 

As children, we were outdoors most of the summer day, off riding on our bikes without much thought given to the kinds of dangers adults worry about today. As long as we were home by dinner time, no one seemed to care where we went. We walked or rode the bus to school; parents didn't drive us as a rule. 

 

Other details also seem to be missing. In a TV ad for something now forgotten, the female voice over said, "This generation has known nothing but war or the threat of war or talk of war." I'm not sure what the point was but it came on regularly. The other TV ads that were so common were for cigarettes. It may seem absurd but when I went for a checkup before getting married, my doctor actually said, if you're going to smoke try something bland like . . .  and he named a particular brand. Seems unreal now, but I remember the conversation well and only later learned that he smoked. Most historicals set in the 1950s select the TV shows as the authentic detail, but skip the ads and ignore the test patterns that ran after the station ended programming. A cousin visiting from New York City in the 1960s was shocked to find that Boston stations ended programming at 1:00 a.m. What was he going to do all night?

 

The story might be taking place in a small town or city, but the big events of the time touched everyone. The McCarthy hearings in 1953 and 1954 led to the well-known black lists but they also explain why some writers of nonfiction felt it necessary to include passages clarifying their opposition to Communism. I came across this in a nonfiction book on mental health. It's an oddity in American publications that I haven't encountered in any other period. McCarthy frightened a lot of people. The other background hum came from the Korean War, which is now mostly remembered through the movie and TV series MASH.

 

That decade also saw the widespread introduction of antibiotics. The 1950s have been called the golden age of antibiotic discovery, and up to half of all drugs commonly used today were discovered in that decade. Of course, our overuse of these drugs may have brought us back to the original problem—diseases with no treatment, but now with treatment ineffective because of growing drug resistance.

 

We may think technology is the defining feature of ages since the 1950s but I'd point to something else: the level of trust, which was taken for granted. We knew our neighbors and expected to be able to call on them when needed. A car accident brought sympathy and help rather than an automatic lawsuit. Pizza was a treat and not a regular one, and people rarely went out to dinner. And there was fewer of everything—fewer cars in the driveway, fewer clothes in the closet, fewer (many fewer) telephones in the house. But there were lots of jobs. Unemployment hovered between 2.7% and, briefly, 6.2%, the same rate as today when businesses are complaining about finding enough workers. We thought transistor radios and TV were amazing. Except for Ray Bradbury and his colleagues, most of us couldn't imagine what was coming in the future.

What decades do you feel more familiar with? What features do you look for in an historical novel in that or any other time? What makes the story feel authentic? 

Getting through the First Draft

Recently I posted a comment on FB that I had reached 57,000+ words in my work-in-progress and now, at last, knew how it was going to end. This sounds absurd to anyone but another writer, and has become more and more likely in my work. 

When I began writing the Mellingham series in the 1990s, I knew who the killer was, the motive, and how the final scenes would play out. The problem was getting there, how did I begin with a killer and a sleuth and keep them occupied through 70,000 words. My first step was to decide on ten chapters with ten scenes each. This idea had flaws, which I discovered in chapter one. Some scenes were long and others were short and some were repetitive because I was determined to get those ten scenes into that chapter. By the end of the book I might not even have ten chapters; instead I had eleven or nine. Sticking to a rigid plan was harder than I expected. I dropped the ten-chapters idea.

 By the time I began the Anita Ray series, set in a hotel in South India, I wanted my scenes to be of somewhat even length, approximately three pages or fifteen hundred words. Confident in my new plan, I scribbled along happily until I found some scenes running fifteen pages and others barely one. I once asked another mystery reader what was the shortest chapter she had encountered, and she replied, "It was one word. 'Help!' "  It's nice to know another writer has won that competition and the rest of us can stop worrying about it. The only conclusion I was ready to draw was that each chapter should have more than one scene, but I soon had to abandon that rule also.

I once read a short story that went on for almost fifty pages without a single scene break. (Some of you may know this story, and if so, leave me a note in the comments.) I read with one part of my brain watching how she did this, how she managed to keep the pace and scenes threaded together without exhausting the reader, who usually expects a moment of rest for a deep breath and assimilation. I'm not likely to try this approach in crime fiction.

 

My current approach is to give each day a chapter regardless of how many scenes that involves. In a busy day for my MC, that could mean up to nine scenes. My tendency is to mark a scene change when the emotional tone of the action changes, and this can be even in the middle of a conversation. My Beta readers often comment on this in negative terms so I've had to revise my thinking, but I do so somewhat reluctantly. I like my placement of scene changes because I think they signal something to the reader.

 

After I have a completed first draft I expect I'll have to go back to the beginning and reorganize the scenes into more logical chapters, but right now this is the structure that gets me through the writing and keeps me moving forward. I didn't say it was logical. It's useful. And as a writer I am always practical. What devices do you use to push your way through the first draft?

Time Away

Since my first book, A Reader's Guide to the Classic British Mystery (1988), I've stuck to the basic rule of writing every day, which for me has also meant developing a story idea, doing research, revising, rounding out characters, and working out ideas for the narrative. That's been a pretty good guide for all the years since my first mystery, Murder in Mellingham (1993), though I haven't published nearly as much as more prolific writers. I also include in my writing history hundreds of grants, essays, reviews, and other nonfiction work. But this month, I found I'd taken a hiatus of almost ten days. Was it a disaster? Did it ruin my WIP? (And where did the time go anyway?) 

When I took the time to assess where I was in the ms along with my list of questions about the plot, I found that the ten days' respite had given my unconscious time to resolve the issues, and the narrative gaps and bumps had been filled in and smoothed out. It was a relief.

 

I didn't expect this to happen, and I'm not convinced it would have if I'd planned it. Writers learn to trust the unconscious, our intuition, to solve story issues. Would this character actually do this? or say this? Does that sound like him? Would she really want that to be the end of it? If I let her do this, can she really follow it with that? Sometimes I can't answer these questions until the end of the first draft, and then I have to go back and pull scenes into line, straighten out the wobbly character or fill in the missing dialogue. But this time none of the resolutions were forced, and each seemed exactly right.

 

The time away from writing while I was absorbed elsewhere served me well, but I'm not going to make a practice of it. When the first draft is finished, I generally set the ms aside for two or three weeks so I can come to it fresh and see more clearly where it falters, when something is missing or a passage sounds clunky or confusing. But I avoid taking time off in the middle of the first draft because it feels risky. I'm afraid of losing the thread of the plot, or the energy propelling the story forward. But I'm glad to know I can survive a hiatus if I have to.

 

Do you have the same worries, or is taking a break in the middle of the first draft easy for you?

 

 

Exploring Narrative Form: Review: Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi.

As part of my reading around the world in the company of women, my project to read a book by a woman from every country, I read Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi. Those who expect a linear narrative will find this novel challenging. Several characters move to center stage and give us their view of their life. In the end we have a vision of the people of Oman, the impact of significant changes since the 1920s, and the web holding several women together. 

Translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth.

First published in Arabic in Oman in 2010.

Published in English by Catapult Press, 2019.

Winner of the Man Booker International Prize.

 

Mayya is a young girl, silent and devoted to her sewing machine. Around her swirls the life of her large family, her two younger sisters Asmi, who hoards books recovered from the trash, and Khawla, who fixates on her beauty and the cousin who promised they were to marry; her mother, Salima, and the girls' father, Azzan; the servants and newly freed slaves; and the various relatives and neighbor women who come in and out of the house, visiting, paying condolence or congratulation calls. 

 

Told in the setting of a deeply conservative culture, sprinkled with historical turning points and Arabic poetry, the narration explores the family members, each one getting short chapters of his or her own. The narrators circle around the mysteries of their lives: Mayya, Abdallah her husband, London, their first daughter given an unusual name that elicits distress from others; Asma, Mayya's younger sister, who wants an education but is too old for the early grades; Qamar, a Bedouin woman who has carved out a life of near-total freedom for herself among her people who live camped outside the village and turns her desire on Mayya's father; Zarifa, a slave who was sold and forced to marry, who takes it upon herself to defy her slavery by sheer force of will and who challenges her son who insists now that he is free he can violate all the traditions if he wants to, but she knows secrets; Masouda, a wife locked into a room, cared for by her daughter, who may or may not be mad; Khawla, who is determined to remain true to her childhood sweetheart; Salima, the girls' mother, who grew up neither slave nor daughter of the house; Ankabuta, a slave woman and Zarifa's mother; Khalid, Asma's husband; Fatima, Abdallah's mother; Marwan the Pure, who isn't; Sulayman, a young merchant who founds a long family line with his wealth from the slave trade beginning in the 1890s.

 

The author only hints at linearity in the narration, and yet the stories hold together, the lives intersect, and mysteries are answered.

Goals 2022

I've been thinking about setting goals and whether or not it's worth the effort. I can't even remember what my goals for this past year were, and I'm not eager to check and see if I met them. The pandemic has thrown everything off for me as well as many others, but as I look forward into the new year I admit that I have hoped to get certain things done.

First, the fifth Anita Ray is ready to go, so one goal is to publish and promote In Sita's Shadow. This means promotion, so . . . 

 

Second, I will try at least one new promotional approach in sending Anita Ray out into the world again so I can feel I'm not stagnating in that department (I won't mention backsliding).

 

Third, I've enjoyed doing more with my blog, so I'll continue that (or this).

 

Fourth, a certain magazine continues to reject my stories, even though I sometimes get a nice note from the editor. I'll keep trying to place one story in that magazine. Maybe I'm becoming obsessive, but at least I'm motivated.

 

That's enough pre-planning for one year. I'll leave world peace and ending poverty to those more powerful than I am.

 

What about your goals? Are they simple, practical steps or are they larger, more abstract?