Researching a story… to death.

 Writers research. Even fiction writers. After all, readers want details and they expect them to ring true. Location, weather, clothing, food, transportation. These are the basics. Don’t have someone take a bus in my hometown of Madisonville, Kentucky. There aren’t any.  Detail should slip into the story like water through a crack. No blaring signs that say: look, I got the music and the moon boots right, it’s 1983! Instead, the subtleties of detail should ring true silently. With them, the reader feels a place without signposts. Mention endless fields of cotton, small bottles of Coke for a nickel in a chilled machine, blazing heat followed by shattering lightening and I think the Mississippi Delta in the 1970s. A few details and I’m there. Get a detail significantly wrong and I’m pulled away. After all, that’s where I spent my summers in those years. At my grandparents, frying eggs on the bricks of their patio, it was so hot. Impressed – and a little frightened- by the enormous circles of burned cotton where lightening struck the fields overnight. And not quite understanding why we had to play inside some days (later I’d learn it meant there was a prison escaped from Parchman penitentiary, which was the plantation over).  Currently, I’m in the planning stages of a book set partially in war time Austria. This is a different kind of research from that of a contemporary setting. I have a list of things that need answers: what do people wear, eat, listen to, read, care about…. How do they travel, what kind of money, means of communication…  The list began to be endless. After all, I’m really talking about everything. Ultimately I realized that the list is a reminder that details need to be checked, but I don’t need to actually know everything. Take food. Do I need to know what kind of food people ate everyday? Only if food is mentioned in a scene, which it likely will be. So I take what I do know and do a bit of research on cafe culture in Vienna in the 1930s. If I end up with a scene in a cafe I’ll double check the place and the food. Otherwise I might stay in the research phase until I’m frozen by information overload. Then the book – my book – never gets written. I was reminded of my graduate studies in history. The best way to sum up graduate school is too much to read. You quickly learn to skim, to summarize, to look for only the important details (different from every detail that supports an argument). If a book is peripheral to your core concentration you might read only the first and last sentence of every paragraph…. reading the entire paragraph only if the quick version indicates it is of particular interest. You begin graduate school taking pages of notes on every book you are assigned. You end graduate school with a few key sentences about the book.  I’m applying this to research for my current work. Right now, I have a few ideas, possibly evolved enough to call them plot points, but they may change. I need to read widely in order to sweep in information that might prove critical to the story. But I can’t worry about every detail. Not yet, anyway.  Later, when I’m deep in the writing and the details of place and dress and food and music matter I should have enough of a sense of the overall culture to pick the important elements. Try writing about Vienna in the early part of the twentieth century and not mention a cafe…. I think it would stand out as an omission to anyone familiar with the place and the era. When I’m writing that cafe scene, know where to look for a more precise assortment of details. Until then, I won’t worry about them.   

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The Writers Group….. this isn’t your Beta reader

 Last night my writers group met. This is a public, regional group. We meet monthly and two members present a work in progress, often an essay, poem, or short story, sometimes 5,000 words from a longer piece.  We are a varied membership, including published authors, aspiring authors, writing faculty from local universities, and people who are curious and think they want to write.  I’m sometimes asked about the value of such a group and how it differs from Beta readers.  Most clearly, the difference is that a Beta reader is committed to ‘this project.’ The project they have agreed to read. I think Beta readers should appreciate, and hopefully read widely, in the genre of the manuscript, but most importantly they are reading as a ‘reader.’ They may not be writers at all. Good readers, widely read and critically thinking readers are invaluable for writers. They are the perfect Beta reader.  A writing group is full of people who want to write (writers must also be readers, but that is a topic for another day). Members of a writing group hope to hone craft. They hope to learn from the struggles of others, and to in turn make a contribution to the success of their fellow writers. They want comradery in their common quest for excellence. If you are establishing a writing critique group be clear in your goals, the time commitment, and the ground rules of criticism. Here’s a bit about how ours works.  Monthly meeting. We meet for 30 minutes of food and beverage with conversation, followed by a two-hour time slot for the actual critique. This schedule helps us get to know each other in the social time and keep the critique portion on a different professional plane. We rarely use the full two hours for critique. We have established the length of the pieces allowed, and the readers have a long weekend between submission and meeting. We meet in a public place (restaurant or café) so everyone feels comfortable. This also allows us to be an ‘open to the public group’ and we benefit from the diversity and slow churn of membership. The submissions are emailed to the group, but the meeting notice is in the newspaper and on our Facebook page. Although not written, we do have rules. Mostly we ask that criticism be polite in spirit and tone. We also suggest that the author absorb the commentary without being defensive. The author can ask questions if the criticism isn’t clear, but otherwise try to accept the advice as given. I wouldn’t trade my Beta readers for anything, but my writers group has a special role in my writing world. If you aren’t part of one, consider joining or creating your own. 

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The Five Senses

Picture a favorite scene from a favorite book…… I suspect you’re not only ‘seeing.’ Perhaps the snowscape is accompanied by the bite of a howling wind, cold ears and nose, the taste of chapstick, and the smell of the salt dumped on the road to clear the ice. Or you have a more peaceful scene in mind. Warm kitchen, smell of rising bread, sun’s rays glinting off dust particles as they shift across a table and chairs, the screech of the screen door.  We commonly describe what we see. But science tells us that smell is the most lasting memory (and we have a limited spectrum compared to our canine companions…. imagine what they remember!). Touch is important but we often take it for granted. In addition to sight and smell, we have sound and taste. Together they create our world. Every scene should have these elements – not shoved in per check list but included thoughtfully. Fully visualize the scene…. now take it a step further than what you see. What might you hear? The spoken word? Or a peaceful/ominous nothing? The absence of something expected is powerful. Why isn’t the creek babbling in the distance? Has it been dammed, frozen, emptied by drought? Or is the delicate babble of the creek slowly growing in the protagonist’s mind until it is a roar.  Now what do you smell? A meal being cooked? Or burned? A dog wet from a bath or from a daring race across a field on a rainy day? Is the wet dog a reminder of a routine Saturday chore or a hint at something very wrong at the neighbors? Taste can be a sip of exquisite wine setting up a memorable meal, or the metallic taste of adrenaline and uncontrollable fear. Touch is the pain of weary feet running barefoot three miles through snow for help or the inexplicably soft skin of a newborn baby. Is that the softness of hope? Or regret as the baby is taken away….. A friend once asked which sense I would give up if I had to choose. I waffled between taste and hearing. Touch is dangerous since without it you can’t feel heat or cold. Sight – even before the advent of audio books – meant a separation from reading and of course impacted so many aspects of daily life. Not being able to taste for a few days might give me a bump on my diet (certainly no need to have that piece of cake if I can’t taste it) but I do love food! Loss of hearing is isolating. In short, each of our senses play an important role in the complete picture of our life. If you do without one in your writing you are leaving out a piece of the world.   

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Food and drink and characters and places

   In my household we love to cook. Perhaps that’s why food plays a role in my writing. Whether prepared at home by loving hands or a resident chef, or ordered in a restaurant or take-out stand, food is more than a staple of life. It says something about who we are as individuals and as a society.  In my Swiss series, I can’t pass up mention of spaetzli or rösti, these staples of a ‘real’ Swiss household. And no one in Switzerland would order ‘a coffee’ in a restaurant. The order would be specific: espresso, cappuccino, latte, café Americano. This is not the land of the drip coffee pot. Actually, hot chocolate should have headed that list. There is nothing better than a real European hot chocolate. Here, despite famed Swiss chocolate, I think the Venetians and the Viennese do it best!   Currently, I’m working on a book set in Kentucky. In it, I’ve included bourbon as a food group (actually giving my heroine a distillery). However, there must be food. What to pair with bourbon? A hot brown. This classic open face sandwich was created in 1926 at the Brown Hotel in Louisville. If you’re unfamiliar with it, imagine a slice of toast covered with sliced turkey and tomato, doused with a Mornay sauce and broiled until bubbly and browned. Top with two strips of bacon and enjoy. While this may not feature on the lunch menu at a health spa it sure is good.   In fiction, food can evoke a place and time or cause a reader to step outside the story. If a character eats fried green tomatoes on a hot Mississippi day I can picture the smell, taste, even the sight. If this happens at a picnic in Ohio I am suspicious. Did this family move from the South?  Soft drink names are another great local custom. Soda, pop, coke (for any soft drink) are regional tells. In and around Lexington, Kentucky you might skip the nationally recognized brands and order an Ale-8. Travel farther south west near Kentucky Lake and expect only RC on the menu.    Thinking about food and drink in writing makes we think about creating a menu based on favorite books. I created several menus in Swiss Vendetta compliments of Arsov’s French chef but I’ll have to work on menus for other books now.  What favorite book would inspire food for you? 

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A Rose, by Any Other Name. Or Jane? Maybe Tiffany.

As I’ve been touching up my current WIP it occurred to me that the names of a couple of characters were combinations of past pets and close friends. It wasn’t a conscious pattern, it just worked out that way because I liked the way the names sound when I say them out loud. Tell me, my fellow Miss Demeanors? How do you come up with character names? Michele: Sometimes when I read a book, it strikes me that a character’s name seems off. A thirty-year-old woman is unlikely to be names Linda. I go online to the year of the character’s birth and peruse the first twenty-five names. From there, I look at where the story is located, what’s the heritage of the character’s family, etc., and take it from there. I also try very hard not to duplicate the first initial of the name of any character because I’ve read it’s confusing to readers and tend to agree. Robin:  Good point, Michele! I also look out for similarities in syllables. Real people around me have as few as one syllable and as many as 3 in their names. I try to mimic that real-world asymmetrical pattern in my cast of characters. Susan: I torture myself over names. If a name’s not right, I can’t more forward and so I spend a lot of time looking through baby names and so forth. I think my favorite character name was Arabella Hicks, who was the protagonist of The Fiction Class. I imagined her mother to be a fan of Georgette Heyer and inspired by one of Heyer’s best heroines. But for my protagonist, Arabella, the name was a nightmare. She was not a romance novel sort of person and would much rather have been named Jane. I liked the idea that the conflict between Arabella and her mother went back to the moment of her birth, and had to do with their two differing ways of seeing the world. And I got all that from her name. Tracee: Susan, I also loved your main character’s name in The Fiction Class! Names are critical. I often use a placeholder (particularly for minor characters) in a draft. A name that I ‘like’ but I know isn’t exactly right. With my books set in Switzerland I also run the names by my Swiss husband. I may think a name sounds right, and have done the research about names of a certain era, etc. but my husband has a local different ear. He will first quiz me about the character’s parents, and education, and place of birth (city or region), religion, and then be ready to discuss. I should confess that I once named a minor character in a book (first name) after a friend who was the inspiration for the character’s physical description. The name was so perfect that I forgot it was her real name and left it in that way. No harm done, but I only realized this in the middle of a publish talk when the question of names came up, and how closely characters are based on people I know. Alison: I’m a huge fan of the social security website. I use it a lot for background characters. Because my books take place in Utah and the larger LDS community, I love using names from Mormon history and scripture. Detective Abish Taylor, my protagonist, got her first name because Abish is one of only a handful of women who are referred to by name in the Book of Mormon. I wanted her to have deep Mormon roots, so she’s also a direct descendent of the third President of the Church, John Taylor. One of my favorite characters (and all around delightfully bad guy) has a secret nickname based on Orrin Porter Rockwell, who was a private body guard to both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. A famous–perhaps apocryphal–story about Rockwell has the sharp shooter defending himself on charges of trying to assassinate the former governor of Missouri by pointing out to the court that he, Rockwell, “never shot at anybody, if I shoot they get shot!” Alexia: I often use street signs/place names. I use baby name websites most commonly. Once in a while I use names of people I know. I’ve auctioned off a character naming opportunity once. Sometimes a movie inspires me. Gethsemane Brown is an homage to Cleopatra Jones. Occasionally, a name will pop into my head out of nowhere. You reminded me, Michele, I also use the Census archives to find names that were popular during certain eras. Cate: I use baby name finder to find names with etymologies that evoke the character. I also use the census to find names that were popular during certain times or for certain ethnic groups. I also tend to change my names. I start off with one and then decide, during the course of writing, that the character is really more like someone else. How about you, dear reader? How do you go about naming your characters? 

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A Little Help From My Friends

Have I mentioned before that writing is a team sport? Sure, sure, they’re my hands at the keyboard to make the magic happen but every now and then I need a sounding board. My regional chapter of Mystery Writers of America invited me to submit an article to our monthly newsletter. They asked for my expert view on cyber crime topics, which I’m more than happy to share pretty much anytime, anywhere. The challenge? They left the topic up to me. They gave me the prompt of common misconceptions and/or how to get the subject right. As a veteran investigator, my point of view is different from yours. I know what I know. And I know what I’ve noticed when others write about technical crimes. But that still left a lot of options. I couldn’t decide how to narrow it down to a single topic. There were so many ways to go. I did what any mature adult would do. I went out to dinner. Between the salad and the entree, I threw the question to my dining companion. Conversation turned to depictions of cyber-y things in pop culture.  Within seconds, I found myself sliding my soapbox out from under the table and getting ready to climb on board. “You know what drives me crazy?” I said. “No, but whatever it is, that’s your topic,” my companion answered.  My I’m-about-to-make-a-point finger froze mid-waggle. It landed on my lip as I pondered whether it would be rude to start typing away in the Notes app on my phone. 

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A Few Words About Words

I’m seeing lots of tweets and blog posts about word count these days. What’s interesting to me is there seems to be a lot of angst about cutting down manuscripts to hit the sweet spot of “not more than” 90,000 words for mysteries and thrillers. I wish that was my problem. Cutting is easy. At least for me. I’ve spent years learning to tailor reports and presentations to executives: make your point, make your ask, take questions, using as few words as possible. On the one hand, it’s made me great at pitching. One-age synopsis? No problem. However, my first drafts tend to run under 50K words. My challenge during revisions is beefing up the word count without slowing the pace. Or adding too much fast-paced action and giving the reader a heart attack. So what do I do? Ignoring the word count seems to work well for me. In first drafts, I just get the thoughts down in any crappy way I can. During revisions, I clean it up. I take out the placeholder bad sentences I bashed out in a rush because my commuter train was pulling into my station, like “MC and other person argue about x.” Those placeholders get turned into full scenes. I’ve learned to remove technical jargon and replace the terms with normal human words to convey the same ideas. Subplots get beefed up, others get dropped. And so on. My wonderful agent also has a way of asking a simple question that inspires me to add new scenes or add depth to existing scenes. By the time I finish with the major revisions, I end up in the right neighborhood for the desired word count. I guess my secret is no secret, I just try to relax and tell the story. The words find a way.
 

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Nature or Nurture?

Are writers born or are we made? Writing is a compulsion for me. It’s something I did long before I had an agent, because I enjoy it. It feels like a release. I also enjoy creating something out of nothing. I imagine it’s a similar feeling that craftspeople have when they work on a piece and watch it take shape.
 I was pondering this question while looking at family photos. The living room of my parents’ house was overshadowed by bookshelves. Here’s a glimpse. That’s my dad with our dog. The photo only shows half the bookcase. It was so large, I don’t think there’s a single photo that shows the whole thing. My dad built the shelves when we moved in and my parents filled them through library book sales, garage sales, gifts, and, of course, book stores. There were titles from a variety of genres but my dad was partial to thrillers and history. My mom enjoyed memoir. My brother liked horror. I would read pretty much anything put in my hands but I loved mysteries. By the time I moved out, I’d read nearly every book on that wall. It was kind of a family competition.
 Thinking about it now, there’s a strong connection between what I grew up reading and what I now write. Did my family influence my love of the written word? Absolutely. But I also recall writing mysteries from an early age, hoping to entertain my parents. So which came first, nature or nurture? I honestly don’t know. Why not both?
 

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Wedding stories

Possibly because in the last eight months I’ve been to 4 weddings (among them my daughter’s and my niece’s), I’ve become slightly obsessed with weddings. Each one is so different. Each bride is so lovely and each family dynamic so fascinating. Each wedding feels like a mini-novel with food. The bride is generally the protagonist of the story, but only time will tell who the antagonist is. You can see my mind is churning. So, I asked my fellow Miss Demeanors if they had any memorable wedding stories and this is what they said:  Michele: I have had the honor of officiating at two weddings, which made them very special to me. The first was for a former client whom I had represented during his divorce. That was quite an honor and it was a delight to see him so happy with his lovely new wife. The second was for an older couple in their late seventies. Both had lost earlier spouses. They had been living together in Florida and decided to make it official. The wedding was in my favorite cousin’s home and was beautiful from the flowers to the food to their their fancy wedding clothes. After I pronounced the couple married, I had to do the ceremony all over again so they could wear their Harley Davidson outfits to show their biker pals back home. I even found wedding vows for bikers. You can’t make up a story like this! I am so glad they had those moments. The husband died about a year later and the memories are very special for his bride. Robin: I was a guest at the wedding of an exotic dancer. It was, hands down, one of the most romantic ceremonies I’ve seen. Beautiful grounds on a warm June day in Marin County, lovely cellist, flower girl tossing out white rose petals, officiated by a friend of theirs who clearly knew them well, a woman who beamed the whole time and shared cute stories. A fair number of attendees were also strippers who were interesting and fun to talk to so it was one of the more fascinating receptions. Most of them, including the bride, didn’t drink. They toasted with sparkling, non-alcoholic cider. Cate: Wow.. These are all such great stories. The most memorable wedding that I attended would have to be my own. My grandfather made Jamaican Rum punch. To people unfamiliar with the punch, it can taste deceivingly non-alcoholic because of all the strong flavors of the fruits, despite containing bottles of over-proof white rum. More than half the guests didn’t realize that the punch was packing. It started off as a wedding and basically ended up as an Irish wake. So, both of my heritages were represented. Tracee: I agree with Cate’s Wow. I also suspect Cate’s reception was pretty much wow as well! I avoided all drama and was married in a civil service in Hong Kong (Our wedding dinner was in a private home on Victoria Peak, with the tables set alongside the indoor pool. The hostess had covered the water with flower petals and was more worried about every detail than I would have ever been!)I have to keep details to a minimum with this next one so the participants remain anonymous, but years ago I was at a wedding rehearsal where the young nervous groom stood up to the overbearing and over confident father-of-the-bride and told him that under no circumstances was he to be late for the actual wedding. It was done politely but with certitude. There was a collective moment of stunned silence then a very long sense of well done! (The sense of well done has lasted for over 30 years…..) Alison: Wonderful stories! One of my favorite wedding memories is the story of my train. My grandma was a gifted seamstress. We designed the dress together, and she sewed it from ivory silk faille with tiny pearls and cream Austrian lace. It was an off-the-shoulder sheath with a long narrow train. The plan was to edge the train with the lace and pearls. At the final fitting, my grandma rolled out the five-foot train. Not only had she sewn hundreds of tiny pearls on the lace edging of the train, but she’d also sprinkled flowers of lace and pearls across the center of train. I loved it. Her eyes teared up. She’d been worried about my reaction. The last time she had worked on the train, she pricked her finger. Several drops of blood had fallen on the pristine fabric. There was no way to clean the train without ruining it. So, she covered the drops with lace and pearls instead. . . . Yes, I still have the dress. Thinking about it brings tears to my own eyes now. Very happy tears. Alexia: I confess no particular wedding stands out to me. I’ve only participated in one wedding, as a bridesmaid, a couple of decades ago. Most of my friends married decades ago and I don’t have children or young relatives so I haven’t attended any weddings as a guest recently. I’ve volunteered on the wedding committee of various Altar Guilds so I’ve worked at a few weddings (and been amused by some of the behind-the-scenes goings on) but i haven’t had any emotional connection to any of those. Weddings really aren’t my thing. Paula: I love weddings. I loved (both of) mine. But my favorite wedding was the wedding of two longtime writer friends. She’s Thai and he’s Catholic and they had both a priest and her mother there to do the Thai part of the ceremony. His family brought holy water from the Vatican, and her family brought holy water from a Buddhist temple in Thailand. Each family member carried a small shell of holy water, and poured it into a huge conch shell, in a symbolic combining of their two traditions.Afterward I sat with a bunch of my friends, all of whom, myself included, had been divorced. We were all bemoaning marriage was and then I finally said look, “Indi and Randy are the most well-suited couple we know, and if anyone can make it work, they can. We have to believe in marriage today, so let’s all clap for Tinker Bell.”And so we all clapped for Tinker Bell. Indi and Randy are still married today years later. They have two beautiful children. How about you, friends? Do you have any memorable wedding stories?          

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