Month: April 2017

I’m in the throes of edits right now. Lots to do and never enough time. However, I can’t simply sit at a desk and work. I need breaks to clear my head or to think through a problem. For this I turn to yard work. I’d like to call it gardening but that would imply knowledge beyond “the grass is too high”. My yard is large enough that it takes a couple hours on a riding mower, plus there are always sticks to pick up, along with other ‘non-thinking’ but productive activities. My mind can wander and at the same time I can stop at any moment and run back inside and work on writing (the neighbors are used to seeing my mower sit in the front yard for a while in the middle of the job). I should note that taking baths is another favorite break/dash right back to work ploy. You would think that walking our Jack Russells several times a day would do the trick, but it’s not the same. They demand my full attention and I can’t drag them back to the house on a whim when inspiration strikes. Same thing with my other real hobby – painting. Stop at the wrong point there and the brushes dry, the paint sets, and you’ve ruined the piece. My question is: what do you do in these moments when you need to write but also clear your head?  Paula Munier – I walk the dogs, I garden, but for me the most important way I recharge physically, mentally, and emotionally is yoga. Yoga clears my head, it keeps my shoulders and neck and arms and hands and fingers flexible and pain-free, and it gives me the emotional ballast I need to face the page. I do yoga at home, and I go to yoga classes at my favorite yoga studio whenever I can. My latest plan: A long weekend at Kripalu, a yoga and wellness retreat in the Berkshires. My reward for turning in my latest book to my publisher. Namaste! https://kripalu.org Susan Breen – I find walking my dogs a great way to clear my head. I walk the same path every day, twice a day, a circle through my woods, so because the dogs and I know what we’re going to do, it frees me up to look around and see how things are changing. Particularly this time of year, I’m always on the look out for things blooming or sprouting or erupting.  I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve pushed a story forward just by rambling around. I also love doing jigsaw puzzles, and I find watching HGTV very soothing. A half an hour of Lottery Dream Home and I’m ready to go.  Michele Dorsey – Simple repetitive tactile tasks like weeding, chopping for a recipe, even folding laundry help me quiet my mind and sort through my thoughts. To lose myself physically, like Paula, I practice yoga. I’ve discovered doing yoga in the ocean is even more soothing than on my mat. I love to walk the paths through the Audubon Sanctuary near my home.  I can also sit quietly in a church, a museum, or a library and distill the clutter in my head. The key to any of these is solitude. I remember my mother imitating Greta Garbo saying, “I want to be alone.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tojjWQvlPN8  Now I get it!  Robin Stuart – What you describe happens to me all time because I’m either so excited about what I’m writing that I can’t get the words out fast enough or I’m stressed because the words won’t come. Either way I need a physical outlet to release the pressure. What that looks like depends on where I am and time of day. I write at all different times of the day or night because of my schedule. If the option is available I’ll go for a hike or bike ride. Mountain biking, especially, commands full attention which is great for a mental reset. If those options aren’t available, I turn up the music and dance it out. If it’s late at night or too early in the morning for a dance party then I meditate for 5-10 minutes to clear my head and get my butt back in the chair. Cate Holahan – I go out with my girlfriends to de-stress and get out of my head.  Alexia Gordon – I go for a walk. A meandering stroll through town helps clear my head. Sometimes I stop in at a cafe or coffee shop so I can people-watch and eavesdrop (I admit it). Eavesdropping often provides material. If the weather (or the fact that I’m still in my pajamas) precludes going out, I find a British mystery to read or watch. Midsomer Murders, Poirot, and Marple are my go-to sources to put me in a homicidal frame of mind. 

My neighbor is a big reader and we had an interesting conversation over the fence this lovely spring weekend. He doesn’t like to read elaborate descriptions. To him, an elaborate description is the gun on the tabletop in scene one that never gets discharged. He gave an example: in the thriller he is currently reading there is a scene where the protagonist walks down a long corridor. The scene is complete with a detailed description of the doors the protagonist passes, what he sees at the other end, etc. In the end, the man gets to the end of the hall and goes into a room. My neighbor read the passage carefully, sure that the careful attention to detail meant that there were important clues in the text – or at a minimum something would happen behind one of those doors. He felt that the description made it difficult to separate important detail from general atmosphere.  This is a problem for writers. First of all, no two readers are the same, so you can’t satisfy everyone. Some people like to use their imagination to fill in most of the details of places and people. A long narrow corridor. A tall dark stranger. Good enough. They’ve got the idea and the tall dark stranger gets filled in with their ideal, not the writer’s. Same thing with places. My long narrow corridor may look different from everyone else’s, but does it matter if there is crown molding or not?  I believe that there should be enough detail to get close to what the author imagined, but I can sympathize with the notion that too many details are information overload for a reader. This came up in my conversation with my neighbor. Afterwards it struck me that the average reader’s access to information has altered what we want. Think of Charles Dickens or Leo Tolstoy or Victor Hugo. These men were literary giants in their day, hugely popular in every sense of the word. They set a scene that was possibly unimaginable to their readers – a glimpse of the darkest side of industrial England’s workhouses and slums and law courts. The vast battle fields of Russia and the gaiety of aristocratic balls. The dark currents of Paris, including those running under the streets. These scenes were so finely wrought that they are useful to historians today. Modern society has access to images on television, at the movie theater and on-line. Take Industrial England. Google it and you are overwhelmed by images and descriptions (not all accurate, but that’s a separate issue). No longer are novels the main form of exposing people to faraway places or ideas. As a result, we have adapted as readers and therefore as writers.  Or have we? Description still plays a vital role in a novel. I read to remember places I’ve been, and to dream about places I’ll never go. For me, it remains a balance. I want to see into the mind of the author, all the while knowing I’ll continue to fill in details from my own imagination. That’s also my goal as a writer.  I’m curious, though, what do others want? Plenty of description or spare spare spare? There is definitely room for both. 

John Le Carre was a government agent before he started writing spy novels. Hank Phillippi Ryan is an investigative reporter who writes about an investigative reporter. On the other hand, Tom Clancy was an insurance salesman before he wrote espionage novels. Lee Child was a TV producer, among other jobs, before he started the Jack Reacher series. Readers of our blog know I’m a cyber crime fighter who writes about cyber crime. How about you, my fellow Miss Demeanors? Do you write what you know, or do you write based on research or another source of inspiration? Cate: I’m a former business journalist who covered technology companies, often the cute social networking startups that ended up taking over the world. I was also a television news producer. I think the decade of journalism, working for newspapers and magazines, taught me how to research and write tight. I bring that to my fiction. My stories, however, are more close to home than anything that I covered. As a domestic suspense writer (or psychological suspense, given my upcoming book), I write about close relationships that go wrong. The macro is not as important as the micro for me. Michele: I’ve done some writing using a lawyer as a protagonist, but I’ve had the most fun writing the character of rogue lawyer turned island bar owner, Neil Perry, Sabrina Salter’s significant other. Neil is your typical irreverent, smart, bad boy lawyer. My lawyer colleagues all love him. Some of them think they are him. There is no inspiration better for understanding human depth and conflict than witnessing the agony of people who find themselves in family court. I had more than thirty years of this kind of “inspiration” as a family law attorney and mediator. There are no stakes higher than the threat of the loss of your family as you know it. Paula: I follow my own advice, outlined in my writing books: Write what you know. Write what you love. Write what you’d love to know. I started off as a reporter, and that has served me very well in terms of research as well as craft. I also was an acquisitions editor for many years and that has served me well as an agent and as a writer. But in terms of specifics, I can trace the influences in my work pretty easily, as I think most of us can: 1) Growing up in a military family informs my fascination for all things military and law-enforcement.2) My mother read mysteries and so I did, too.3) My love affair with British literature (and I include crime fiction in that) began when we were stationed in Europe when I was a kid and our British friends introduced me to Sherlock Holmes, and grew as I grew and discovered Jane Austen and Shakespeare and Agatha Christie. My mother took me to Paris and I learned to speak French and I fell in love with all things French as well, including the magnificent George Simenon. Any excuse to weave in anything about Europe or the UK or Shakespeare or Paris is one I can rarely resist.4) I grew up with dogs and cats and I have dogs and cats, so there are always dogs and cats in my stories.5) I am a woman of enthusiasms and these always show up in my books, from chaos theory to potager gardens to Greek mythology. When it comes right down to it, I use whatever I can to help make a story work. And everything I’ve ever done, everything I’m doing now, and everything I will do in the future helps me prime the pump. Tracee: Certainly my life and interests have influenced my writing and my characters. I practiced architecture and think that plays out in my enthusiasm for the nuances of locales. At the same time, I’ve lived and traveled extensively in the US and abroad, and the places I’ve been, and the people I’ve met, walk through my pages. I am also influenced by my early (early grade school) love of mysteries…. how could I not want to contribute to the genre? Ultimately I think that what plays out in my writing is that I am interested in about everything…. I may not be an expert in anything, but I love new experiences and ideas and situations and that plays a role in inspiring the next story. Writing is living vicariously. What a joy it is! Susan: I would add to Paula’s list (which I agree with 100%!) that I also try to write about things I have something to say about. I love cozies. I think Agatha Christie saw me through my childhood, and when I began writing my Maggie Dove mysteries, I was very mindful of Miss Marple, but also wanted to put a Susan Breen spin on that. So I brought in my enthusiasms for church and small villages and feral cats and the Hudson River and economics and Russian history and so on. Alexia: I’m a physician (family medicine) who’s chosen a career in public service instead of private practice. Yes, I’m one of the oft-maligned career Civil Servants. I started out in a primary care clinic at a Military Treatment Facility, changed to Veterans’ Administration outpatient clinics, then decided adventure in the primary care clinic at an Alaskan Native Hospital was the way to go. (I was wrong.) I headed back to the Lower 48 where I took a job at a Military Entrance Processing Station examining applicants for the military. (Think of George Bailey’s 4-F scene in It’s a Wonderful Life.) Then I moved up into a policy job at the HQ (the job I have now) where I work on medical policy governing medical qualification for military service. My first non-clinical job. Oddly, I don’t write about medicine. I get so wrapped up in work, writing serves as a check and balance. Writing reminds me that life exists outside of medicine. I did try to write a mystery (What else?) featuring a physician protagonist but I ended up going off on a rant about the current state of primary care. Okay for the op-ed page, perhaps, but not for a novel. I may create a physician-sleuth someday, once I get to the point where I can take a step (dozens of steps) back from the practice of medicine and approach it objectively. As Jonathan Kellerman said (Yes, Jonathan Kellerman actually spoke to me.) at Left Coast Crime, my career gives me a lot of material to work with.  

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote those oft-quoted words. It’s the first thing I write in new notebooks and have since junior high. It’s more meaningful than ever to me now.  I write cyber crime thrillers. It’s a subject I know way too much about – I’ve been fighting cyber crime for nearly 20 years. Being that close to a complex technical subject means, as a writer, I wrestle daily with terminology. Simplifying computer science concepts that take days, weeks, months and sometimes years to learn is a challenge. I do my best to distill these concepts in plain English. It’s when my development editor, beta readers and agent all unanimously agree that I know I’ve pulled it off. Only 1 of the 3 are on board with the most recent draft of one of my WIPs which means I’ve got work to do. It’s helpful that media and culture are starting to catch up to raise awareness of technology issues but I fell into a trap of overconfidence (or habit) because of that. Thus Emerson’s words came back to me. Keeping it simple isn’t just about the phrasing, it’s also recognizing when the “how” is beside the point. Most people don’t know, or care, how our cell phones work. We just want to know if we get reception and where we left the charger. My lesson these days is focusing the spotlight on the “who” and “why.” Simply put, it’s the characters, silly. 

On a walk yesterday I mulled over the traits of a particular character I’m creating while enjoying a perfect San Francisco spring day. About half the folks I saw bustling alongside me on the sidewalks wore headphones. Writers should never, ever do this.  The sights, sounds, smells and energy of the city all feed my imagination. Yesterday, in particular, it was the snippets of overheard conversations. Here are examples of some bits and pieces: “It’s important to me to eat the meat I kill.” “…then we started tap dancing and I…” “But when he went to Tijuana…” “Frankly, it made me uncomfortable…” “My wife is an architect. She’s in another time zone.” One of these lines helped fling me over a hurdle that ground a work in progress to a halt. When I eavesdrop…er, happen to catch parts of other people’s conversations, I let my brain go wild. I play games with the fragments to piece together stories, the more outrageous, the better. Standing at the crosswalk, dreaming up a story of a vegetarian killer targeting meat-eaters in Tijuana while on tour with his tap dancing troupe, a completely unrelated inspiration blossomed. It unlocked the puzzle I’d been working through about the character in my novel. I don’t know why this works but it does. For me, at least. Maybe it’s because my subconscious takes over pulling at whatever thread frustrates me when I occupy my conscious brain with word games. All I know is that I take these walks often and rarely get “writer’s block.” This may be one of the reasons writing prompts are popular. I just happen to get mine from total strangers. Where do you get your writing prompts/inspiration? 

Did anyone else see Glenn Close on Stephen Colbert last week? He asked her why she’s reprising her Tony-award winning role on Broadway, knowing full well that she’ll be ineligible for another Tony. Her response stuck with me. You can watch it here (thanks CBS!):   Ms. Close’s obvious passion for her craft and enthusiasm for the connection with her audience is what resonated with me. I write for the same reasons. It’s something that I can’t *not* do. Constantly honing my craft, creating visceral experiences through the power of my words, that’s my bliss. The world around us changes and evolves and the publishing markets change and evolve with it. This means there’s always more to learn therefore always room to grow. There’s also that thrill of connecting with readers, or, more accurately, inspiring that sense of connection in someone I’ll likely never even see. Those are the magical moments that keep me going and coming back for more. So, dear reader, please tell me – why do you write?