Tag: writing process

writing process

How to deal with criticism (as a writer)

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 This month’s issue of The Writer magazine contains my article on How to Deal With Criticism. I happened to be under a tight deadline for that article, and it was due right in the middle of ThrillerFest, but it didn’t matter because never has anything I’ve written come so easily. Do you ever just sit down and find words flowing out of you? Me neither, but I did in this case. Partly it’s because I criticize for a living. As a teacher at Gotham Writers, my job is to read through my students’ writing and give them helpful ways to improve it. Although I try to be positive, there comes a point when you have to note that the story would be better if it had a plot. For example. Then, as a writer, I receive criticism for a living. I write something and send it to my fabulous agent. She has a few suggestions. She sends it out to publishers. They have a few suggestions. Then there are the kind folk on amazon. If you can’t figure out how to deal with these suggestions, you’ll have a very short career as a writer. So I had A LOT to say in this article. Plus which, it contains one of my favorite sentences I’ve ever written (perhaps inspired by the fact that I’d just met George R.R. Martin at ThrillerFest. Here it is. “I find being critiqued a harrowing experience. My beautiful words that I have treasured and nurtured for years, are now being flayed alive like something out of Game of Thrones.” So please check out the article. And don’t criticize it! (And thanks to the fabulous Paula Lanier for the photo.)

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Writing is editing. Right?

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 Writing is about editing. We all know that. However, that doesn’t answer the question when to edit. There are a few basic options.Write a draft straight through, perhaps making notes on things to be changed, but use a one directional process. Don’t second guess yourself.Write a good chunk of the manuscript and then revise. This level of revision may involve deleting parts, adding parts, re-ordering scenes, and, of course, fiddling with words.Revise each page as you go. Perfect the page then move on. Pros and cons can be argued for each process.Write straight through and you risk going far down a path you later eliminate entirely. On the other hand, no time was lost in detailed revisions prior to scrapping entire sections.If you revise section by section too much time can be put into the earlier sections and less into the end. Sometimes it shows!Aim for perfection and prevent yourself from moving on. What happens when those perfect sentences end up not belonging in the manuscript at all?  I suspect that authors evolve. For example, the more experience you gain the more confidence you might have in a story arc (and therefore revise each page to perfection as you write). Sometimes the story itself drives the path – the words are flowing and stopping to revise is counterproductive. What is your early editing path? Revise, revise, revise or first reach for the end? 

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NaNoWriMo & Me

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 My first introduction to NaNoWriMo was not auspicious. I was teaching a novel writing class at night and one of my students kept handing in manuscripts that didn’t have contractions. Plus there would be lots of extraneous little words in her pages. It. It. It. Finally I said to her, “For Pete’s sake, why don’t you use contractions?” And she explained that she was doing NaNoWriMo (in which you try to write 50,000 words in the month of November). She needed to bulk her word count. “I see,” I said, thinking that that sounded like a colossal waste of time in order to get a really bloated manuscript. Years passed.  Then, I had a deadline ahead of me. It happened to be November and I thought, why not give this a try? Maybe it will inspire me to write quickly. That was three years ago and after that I was hooked. This year I’m working on a draft of Maggie Dove 3. What I love about NaNoWriMo is that it forces my mind to go in unexpected places. The fact is, I probably write 1,700 words a day anyway, but usually I’m revising things. Trying to make things perfect. Or good, anyway. Shuffling things around. With NaNoWriMo it all comes out fresh, and often I surprise myself. At the start of November, which was only two weeks ago, I had one sentence in my mind about what I thought this new Maggie Dove would be about. Now I have 21,000 words and it’s all so different than I anticipated. I still have a lot of work ahead of me. When November’s done, I’ll go through my NaNoWriMo draft and break it into scenes. I’ll throw out pages. Or store them away for something different. I’ll expand on other things. But, the great thing is that now I know who the characters are, who the murderer is, why it’s done, how it’s done. I have something solid to grapple with.  Thank you, NaNoWriMo and see you next year.

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Taboo Topics

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Some years ago, my fabulous Gotham boss, Kelly Caldwell, wrote an article about writers’ taboos. Were there any topics you just would not write about? I was thinking about that article the other day when I was at my daughter’s bridal shower. I adore my daughter, I loved everyone there, and yet the mystery writer in me could not help but think that it would be a perfect set-up for a murder. I began to plot, but then pushed the idea away. It was my daughter’s day and I didn’t want to appropriate it. (Not now, anyway.) That led me to wonder, however, what topics my fellow Miss Demeanors find taboo. This is what they said: Cate: I don’t consider any topics taboo in a suspense or thriller. Maybe that’s because I started sneaking my mom’s V.C. Andrews books right after I finished reading The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe. Alexia: I can’t think of any subject I consider taboo–off limits, would never, ever go there. (Never say never.) However, I don’t care to write about subjects that I wouldn’t read about. Not because they’re verboten, just because I’ve gotten to a point in my life where I’m okay with not spending my limited time on things that hold no interest for me. Stories about not-too-bright submissive women involved with wealthy, sexually sadistic psychopaths come to mind. Also stories where sex and violence are gratuitous, just there for the shock value, not to serve a plot purpose.I would love to read a murder mystery centered around a bridal shower, unromantic cynic that I am. “Bridezilla Gets Her Due.” How’s that for a title? The caterer did it. D.A.:  I absolutely write about the taboo … in the textbook definition of a social or religious custom forbidding discussion of a particular practice.  My books are about what many Latter-day Saints consider sacred. There are particular challenges to writing about what you’re not supposed to write. It’s easy to understate, exaggerate or avoid. I think readers sense when a writer’s not being honest or fair, and the story suffers. When I’m dealing with a taboo subject, I’ve found the best way to ensure accurate and respectful treatment is to let my characters be themselves. My detective has left the church and her father is a devout and active member. I defer to the characters’ intelligence and let them wrestle with the taboo topics. They do a much better job than I could. The reader then is left to sort things out on his or her own, which really is what you want to happen when you read suspense anyway. As a nod to the taboo, I’ve attached an image of the Salt Lake temple, a structure where sacred covenants no one is supposed to discuss take place.   Michele: My answer to the question of the week is that I could never write about explicit violence to children. I can allude to it, but I can’t even bear to read details about children being hurt, let alone consider writing them. As much as I love Elizabeth George and have read just about every word the woman has ever written, I had skip sections of In the Presence of the Enemy. I didn’t want to experience what Lottie had to endure. But I also believe writing about the abuse and harm to children can raise awareness and help to prevent it. There’s a delicate balance between letting readers know about the cruelty children suffer from and including such graphic details that they recoil from them and stop reading as I do. Tracee: Children and animals are two hurdles I treat carefully. I agree with Michele that awareness can be raised if done correctly but I can’t write about them explicitly. I have a part in a current manuscript where the heroine tries to abandon her dog to a good home and some Beta readers balked – even though she and the dog are re-united a half page later and bond permanently soon after!I’m a big fan of Martha Grimes and she’s raised awareness of cruelty to animals with plot lines involving testing, I thought she handled it well. Revealing enough for awareness without making the reader want to flip though the chapter without reading. Of course I also don’t write about serial killers or other situations which require descriptions of torture or other physical horrors. Robin: I embrace taboo topics a little too readily (ask Paula about that :)). There is one thing I will likely never write, though, and that’s anything involving harm to an animal. Maybe I got scarred by reading Old Yeller in grade school. There are books I love that handle such things artfully without feeling contrived or manipulative, like James Herriot’s books and Garth Stein’s The Art of Racing In The Rain, but I sometimes have to take breaks after scenes I write involving humans; jeopardizing an animal would bring me to a full stop. I’m too much of a sucker for fur babies. Paula: I won’t write about anything I won’t read about. Which means sadism or torture or harm to kids or animals. There are dog heroes in my books, and I worry about the challenges they face just as much as I worry about those my human heroes face–from flying bullets to n’oreasters. As an agent, I know that selling stories  where a child or an animal is killed is very difficult, if not impossible, especially for debut authors. To pull it off requires great craft and greater luck. So if you’re looking to get published for the first time, you might want to avoid these kind of storylines. Then a further thought from Alexia, to our agent: As a tip for aspiring authors who read our blog, does that include child murders that occur “off-screen” (say as part of a character’s backstory or something that happened before the action began)? Or only child murders that occur on the page?Any other topics aspiring authors should think twice about including in their debut effort? And Paula’s reply: Probably best to avoid altogether. Those are the biggest issues. But many editors shy away from graphic violence, rape, incest, and the like. It’s also true that some are avoiding sex trafficking, drug trafficking, serial killers, and terrorism, as they’ve been overdone lately. So if you’re including any of this plot elements you need to find a fresh take…. And here’s the link to Kelly’s article: https://www.writingclasses.com/toolbox/articles/the-care-and-treatment-of-sacred-things-part-i  

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Serial Summer

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This is the Summer of my Submission, which is to say this is the summer when my fabulous agent is working to sell my new mystery novel and I am working very hard to manage my anxiety. I considered taking up drink, and have not ruled it out entirely, but for the time being I’m channeling my anxiety into writing short stories. Which is to say I am now in the midst of writing four short stories.   I’ve never done anything like this. Usually I’m a very focused one-at-a-time sort of person. I explore, I take notes, I cogitate, I excavate and then hopefully something emerges. But at the moment I’m more in a machine-gunning frame of mind. I’m spewing one idea after another onto the page, and it’s sort of fun. Perhaps it’s the writing version of going onto Tinder and dating four guys in one week. (I can hear my son groaning as I write that sentence.) One of the most exciting parts of this speed-writing is that I’m developing characters I normally wouldn’t write about. One particular one that intrigues me is the daughter of a serial killer. I’ve always been interested in what it would be like to be related to someone truly evil. Could you be a good person and have those genes inside you? Would you worry all the time that something evil might emerge or would you just shut the whole thing down, and not think about it at all? Would you love your father? Would you visit him in jail? Would you hesitate to get married because you’d worry that your children would be evil?  So many questions! Which is always a good thing. One thing I absolutely know is what her name will be, but I’ll write more about that tomorrow. Stay tuned.     

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How do you know when you're done?

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This is a question I’m asked frequently by my students, and I wish I had a clear-cut answer. Having an agent is a huge help in this respect because I’m done when Paula says I’m done. But how do I know I’m done enough to send it to Paula?  I have two indicators: When I reach a point when I can read through the manuscript and have nothing else to add. When I begin daydreaming about a different story. That’s usually a sign that my mind has moved on. For further insights, I asked my fellow Miss Demeanors for their thoughts and this is how they replied: Tracee: I’m done when the deadline hits (well, really once the final round of edits are finished, but those have a deadline as well…. ). That’s when the manuscript gets pulled from my fingers. Of course that kind of deadline is for work that will be published – it’s due! I’ve written many full length manuscripts that I’ve never submitted for publication. Those were also ‘completed’ but it is trickier because you can keep on and on and on editing. I’ve always stopped when I felt it was good enough for a professional to view (although that would probably mean an agent which would likely mean a few more edits before submission.). I’ve always liked to ‘finish’ things. It will never be perfect but more time won’t necessarily make it so. And that applies to most anything. Paula:Ha! With my deadline looming on April 1, I’ll be done when it’s April 1. Until I get notes from my editor. In truth, the work is never really done.  Robin: I know I’m done when Paula says I’m done 🙂 My non-fiction and journalism work has all been under deadline so the date played a major part but I stopped tinkering when beta readers previously unfamiliar with the subject matter understood the points I endeavored to make and found the message delivery entertaining. I’m looking forward to fiction deadlines when I can say the same. Michele: The same way I know when I’m done with a recipe, or a garden. When one more ingredient, plant, or word would detract from the work done. Knowing what’s enough doesn’t come easy. Alexia: I’m done at some obscene hour of the morning on the date of the deadline for the final round of edits. Even then, in my head I’m not really done. The nagging thought, “Oh, I should have…,” is ever present, circling like a hungry wolf. Or laughing hyena.
 Cate: Since I write standalone novels, I know it’s done when my protagonist’s arc feels complete. She or he has solved the mystery and the character has grown in some way. Then, I give it a few weeks and read it with fresh eyes, and if it still feels done, it’s done…. At least until my editor tells me I have to change it up. 🙂 

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Unwrapping a character’s emotions

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 Emotional reactions are at the heart of crime fiction. Why do people – myself included – love to read mysteries? I believe it is because the books often deal with the ultimate human experience. Death. They allow the reader to react to death. Reading is a way of processing, understanding and, perhaps in a tiny way, preparing. We want to read about the policeman or physician who deals with death daily and understand how their public and private reactions might differ. We want to experience – albeit vicariously – these moments from a variety of perspectives, including one that might be our own. In 1969, Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross introduced denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance as the stages of grief in her book On Death and Dying. Growing up, my father spoke about these stages in conjunction with his practice. He was an emergency room physician, and I remember him saying that no one should rush into a waiting room and be told that their loved one died in the car crash. There were important intermediate stages – a nurse or staff member telling the family that it was serious, perhaps the move to a private portion of the waiting room, medical personnel speaking to the family and explaining the critical situation, perhaps asking if they want a member of the clergy to join them, then, ultimately the final news. My father acknowledged that in the emergency room these stages might occur within a few minutes, but he felt that people needed at least a chance to touch upon the stages of grief before the jolt of finality. Contemporary mystery novels usually involve death and I try to think about these stages of grief when writing. The stages might move swiftly, or takes years (or forever) to achieve, but they do provide an emotional path. The emotional path can be in response to the action of the book, or can trigger the crime at the heart of the novel. Of course, the stages are not necessarily linear or universally experienced, but for a writer – or anyone – they provide a framework for understanding.      

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Distraction or Inspiration?

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Years ago I met Dean Koontz at one of his book signings. He was and remains one of my literary heroes. As a fledgling thriller author I had a burning question for him. “Do you listen to music when you write?” He looked startled and fixed his darker-than-dark eyes on me. “Wow,” he said. “No one has ever asked me that.” The answer was yes. In fact, he chose a single album per manuscript and played it repeatedly as he wrote. It became the rhythm of the book. For example, when he wrote Sole Survivor, he told me, the accompanying soundtrack was Paul Simon’s “Graceland.” I listened to that album when I read Sole Survivor to see if I could match songs to passages. It doesn’t work that way, of course. Writing a book takes heck of lot longer than reading one. But I’ve listened to music while I write ever since. These days, it’s my iTunes library on shuffle unless I need an extra push to inspire a darker mood than my eclectic pop/jazz/dance/country/80’s/R&B/insert-genre-here tastes run. At such times, I listen to movie scores. Thrillers, of course.  So, my fellow Miss Demeanors, what do you listen to while you write? Cate: I try to listen to music the puts me in the mood of my characters at various points. For my third book, Lies She Told, this was my playlist: All That She Wants: Ace of BaseBack Door Man: The DoorsWhat Kind of Man: Florence and The MachineFire: Bruce SpringsteenEverybody’s Got The Right To Love: The SupremesWerewolf: Fiona AppleJanie’s Got A Gun: AerosmithYou Know I’m No Good: Amy WinehouseSamson: Regina SpektorI Told You I Was Mean: Elle KingFast as You Can: Fiona AppleYouth: DaughterStone Cold Crazy: QueenWith A Little Help From My Friends: Joe CockerPsycho Killer: Talking Heads Tracee: Great questions Robin! I definitely listen to music! I have a long playlist that is background music, often played so low it is barely audible. What I find interesting is that I usually don’t notice it, but if I accidentally hit shuffle and the songs are in the ‘wrong’ order then it’s a distraction. When I really need to focus I listen to the Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos. Otherwise, my playlist is eclectic: Mumford and Sons, U2, Imagine Dragons, Radiohead, Smashing Pumpkins, Carrie Underwood, Eagles, Adele, Coldplay, and much more… including a recent addition. k.d. lang’s rendition of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. That one I still turn up and listen to full throttle. Paula: I have my playlists organized by genre/emotion/audience: romance, country, dance, creativity, meditation, happiness, poignancy, sweet dreams, etc., and for my bad days, f–k you. Note: For whatever reason, this f–k you playlist is the one my fellow writers most often request that I share with them. Go figure.I play whichever playlist suits the scene I’m writing–and if it’s something special, I just create a new playlist. When I’m stuck, I play my OM playlist, which is a combination of kirtan, gregorian chants, and classical music. That always gets me either to the computer or to the yoga mat…and then to the computer. Susan: I can’t listen to anything. I need complete (musical) silence to write. It doesn’t bother me if my neighbors’ are doing construction, but put on Sibelius and my mind goes dead. Alexia: I can’t listen to music while I write. I end up enjoying the music too much and paying more attention to it than to my writing. Mendelssohn is the one exception. I can write with Mendelssohn playing quietly. Usually, I either write in silence or with a quiet buzz of human voices running in the background like white noise. Michele: Put me under the column of writers who don’t/can’t listen to music while I write. I find I am so deeply and sometimes unconsciously influenced emotionally by music that it affects my writing in unintended ways. I like either total silence or the sounds of nature (birds, waves, wind, etc.). I’ve learned I love to write outdoors. It’s not that I don’t love music. Luciano Pavarotti and Andrea Bocelli can make me weep, even though I can’t understand the lyrics. Dave Matthews gets me out of my seat. Simon and Garfunkel have been favorites since I was a kid and bring up lots of memories. I walked down the aisle to Scarborough Fair. I love Irish music. Harps kill me. Piano and violin move me. But all of these reactions to music tend to muddle what I’m writing. I must say I am fascinated by how my fellow Miss Demeanors intentionally use music to set their moods. I may try it.I am writing this while my daughter’s two kittens are practically sitting on my keyboard, purring like a feline orchestra. My mood is definitely influenced. I want to read a cozy. How about you, dear reader? Do you listen to music while you write?  

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Who are we?

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The Miss Demeanors have a new look on our web site.  I love it. It seems mysterious, glamorous and maybe a little dangerous. Sort of like Myrna Loy. None of those words actually describe me, but a person can dream! Anyway, thinking about that made me wonder how my fellow Miss Dismeanors would describe themselves and our group. We’re all mystery writers. We’re all represented by the fabulous Paula Munier. But we’re all quite different too. We write different types of mysteries, for example. We’re living different sorts of lives. So what one word describes us?Here are the answers I received: Alexia: Cool. Women writing crime. What’s cooler than that? Cate:Brave. There is an honesty in fiction, a need for the writer to lay bare her true impressions and observations about human nature from beneath the thin veil of character. Putting yourself out there demands a certain amount of chutzpah. Michele:Dynamic. I am amazed at how much living my fellow Miss Demeanors crowd into life. They are either scooting off to Switzerland, Ireland, or New Orleans, or they are launching new books, even while they raise kids, work as physicians, writing teachers, etc. There is an energy beaming within and radiating from my blog mates. I admit when I’m feeling a tad depleted, I’ll go back to some earlier posts to borrow a little of their energy.  Paula:Persistent. Not a very glamorous trait, but one of the most important if you want to succeed as a writer, or as anything else. Publishing can be a tough business, and the bar is high, and the road to success can be long, but all of us have endured. We’ve learned that the “write, revise, repeat” mantra is the only one that really works. We keep on writing and revising and repeating. We persist. And so we publish.  Robin:Paula beat me to the first word that came to mind. The hazard of being in the latest time zone of the team 🙂 So I’ll say diverse. While we’re all women who write crime fiction, each of us incorporate our unique views and life experiences across multiple subgenres in fun and different ways.  Tracee:Engaged. With everything… their writing, families, blog colleagues, and other members of the writing community. And they still have time for friends, church, teaching, politics….oh, and yes, day jobs. What I admire is how each part of their lives gets the full focus when on deck.  I’ll round if off by saying “friends,” because I think that’s what we’ve become along this journey.How about you? What word one describes yourself?       

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Medieval dogs

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 While doing research on my new mystery, I came across a completely irrelevant bit of information that I found charming. It was in a lecture by historian Toni Mount on medieval nuns. The lecture started off interesting, and then she began talking about wayward nuns. Immediately I was more interested. Then she started talking about wayward nuns and their dogs. I was hooked. Nuns were allowed to keep cats, evidently, because they took care of the mice. But they were not supposed to have dogs, because they served no purpose!!! Of course these medieval nuns led a very difficult life. They prayed and worked constantly, and with little human affection, and so it’s not surprising that they became passionately attached to little dogs, so much so that they would sneak them into church. At one point a bishop had to pass an injunction against bringing dogs and puppies into the choir, Mount points out. For those who were caught, in one particular parish, there was a punishment: the nun had to fast on bread and water on one Saturday. (A small price to pay, I suspect.)  I spend a fair amount of time holed up with my dogs. Being a 21st century writer is not quite like being a medieval  nun, but there is a fair amount of solitary work, and I am up early, and I felt like learning about their dogs gave me a richer understanding of who they were. On such small details are stories built! (If the course sounds interesting, you can find it at www.medeivalcourses.com.)

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