January 2024 – The Writers in Residence

STARTING OVER….

by Rosemary Lord

Happy New Year!

It’s time to come out from hiding under that duvet!

This winter is turning out to be tough on so many, with the freezing temperatures and endless rain across much of America and Europe. But I’m in California, where it’s still often sunny during winter, even when it feels to us as if it’s freezing. My siblings in England ridicule me with our 66-degree “heatwave.” Hey! We’ve had several days of rain – and the ensuing power-cuts and floods. Los Angeles comes to a halt at the first sign of rain…. Enough already! I’m done with winter!

But I digress: Each January is a fresh start. Time to dust off our goals, our dreams, our great plans for life.

As a teenager I had so many dreams and goals – and many of them I have accomplished. The fourteen-year-old me never questioned that I could not go from a quiet little town in England, far removed from the acting and showbiz worlds, to living in Hollywood, (where I knew no one and was totally ignorant of how things worked), to working as an actress and a writer in Hollywood movies. My dreams, my positive beliefs and my naivete fueled my journey. I’m not saying it wasn’t very tough at times, frustrating and sometimes heartbreaking. It took a lot longer than I thought. But I was driven by my dreams and never gave up.

Then a new chapter of my life opened up. My dreams and my goals changed.

Writing was my new focus. I wrote articles about Old Hollywood and Movie Stars from Hollywood’s Golden Era. I wrote about Hollywood history. But I never thought I would be smart enough or talented enough to be a novelist. I was and am still in awe of so many of the great novelists. How could I ever come close to that?

It was shortly after my first non-fiction book Los Angeles Then and Now was published and I was having lunch with fellow British-born writer Jacqueline Winspear. We’d both been honored by the Southern California Book Sellers Association. Jacqui had launched her first amazing Maisie Dobbs novel and I was chosen for my Los Angeles Then and Now. As we chatted about our current and future writing plans, she convinced me that I, too, could write a novel. Even a mystery novel. She explained how Maisie Dobbs came about and the basic method she used. Wow! She opened up a whole new world for me.

A new pathway. She showed me how to look at writing in a totally different way. I will be forever grateful. I subsequently joined Mystery Writers of America and then Sisters-in-Crime. I found a new family of writers.

But even along this writers’ journey, there comes a time when we have to step off into the unknown to get new results, to shake things up.

“This year will be different,” we often promise ourselves on New Year’s Day. But in order for it to be different, we have to do things differently. Maybe it’s a time to take a fresh approach, take another path. I’ve been toying with the idea for a children’s book – taking a break from intense historical research. Another writer friend is inspired to try her hand at poetry this year, after several successful noir thrillers. Perhaps a crack at a movie script?

New Year’s is a great time to plan a do-over. Change writing habits. Shift the energies around. The year ahead is filled with new opportunities, new hopes and wonderful blank pages for us writers to fill.

Perhaps go back to the simple way of doing things – without all the current programs available to us. I sometimes wonder whether our world of social media, immediate access to ‘google’ or ‘duckduckgo’ information is a blessing or a curse.

In days of yore, writers would be found in dusty libraries, surrounded by research books, furiously taking notes. That’s what the Agatha Christies of her day would have done. Jane Austen too. Mary Roberts Rhinehart didn’t use Instagram to tout her The Circular Staircase success. Edgar Alan Poe didn’t have a Facebook page. Charlotte Bronte didn’t Tweet. Raymond Chandler did okay without all that. Hmmm.

But today we have a choice to avail ourselves of those services. And we have Sisters-in-Crime, The Authors Guild and Mystery Writers of America to turn to. We have options.

Writers are storytellers. We’re the ‘wandering minstrels ‘of our time. Minstrels would wander from village to village, singing about the news around the countryside. Today we fictionize the local village stories and don’t have to travel from village to village to share them. We have a flourishing publishing world, movies, television, internet, podcasts and multi-media resources to spread the word. Or we can choose to keep it simple with a yellow pad, pencil and our imagination.

I love the excitement of the New Year options. A chance to start over.

What about you?

Is Handwriting Dead Or Just Dormant?

“The pen is like the needle of a record player held in one’s hand,” Donald Jackson, calligrapher, and scribe to the Late Elizabeth II, once observed. “As it moves across the paper, it releases the music of our innermost selves.”

Wow. I just love that. Sadly if Mr Jackson saw my handwriting he would accurately surmise that I am permanently scattered.

Mahatma Gandhi declared that a poor hand is “the sign of an imperfect education.” But mine leans more towards P.G. Wodehouse who said his, “resembled the movements of a fly that had fallen into an inkpot, and subsequently taken a little brisk exercise.”

Computer keyboards ruined everything for me.

I had the most perfect handwriting. As a Brit we were not trained to write “cursive” which I think is an American form of script. Here is an excerpt from my Home Economics book circa 1969 – please note the hilarious and dated content.

In 1977 I trained as a “shorthand typist” before Dictaphones were invented. In the UK the shorthand was Pitman shorthand; – in the USA it was “Gregg,” although there are many other forms like Teeline or Fastnotes. I could boast 125 wpm (words-per-minute). I loved it. Here is an example of Pitman shorthand taken from “The Lerner’s Shorthand Reader” circa 1892 and priced at 6d.

Isn’t it pretty? If you’d like me to transcribe, I will …

I could “touch type” i.e. there were no letters on the keyboard so I would type the copy without looking at my hands (for those youngsters out there who have never heard the expression). There was also something immensely satisfying about coming to the end of the line and pushing the lever of the carriage return to be rewarded with a cheerful ting!

With the advent of computers, my typing has speeded up dramatically (I just did a free test) and it’s 75 wpm. There is no way my handwriting now could keep up with my brain. Unfortunately, I can hardly hold a pen let alone write with one.

But let’s not forget the reality of handwriting of centuries past. It’s tempting to think that 19^th century penmanship was beautiful and legible. This was not the case. Paper, ink, and postage was expensive. People wrote as small as they could. Anne Brontë’s famous final letter had the lines criss-crossing each other. So even if 21^st century handwriting has deteriorated, in the big scheme of things, that’s nothing new. Sadly, a recent survey found that in the past five years, 12% of Britons have written nothing at all – not even a note. With the demise of the check book here in the UK, signatures are barely needed either. Some people don’t even have a PEN!!! I was at the post office recently using my USA credit card which demanded a signature to find that I was the only person in the store who carried a pen!

“When you type on a screen, the words seem as fleeting as rays of light. When you write, there’s a real physicality to it that adds another dimension to how you experience your own writing. It fosters a deeper engagement with the material you write, makes the writing voice inside your head clearer and louder.” Quote from Omwow blog, https://omwow.com/longhand-writing/

I love that expression “words seem as fleeting as rays of light.”

Handwriting is deliberate and intentional and requires focused attention. It encourages us to be fully present in the moment. Neat and well-formed handwriting can also indicate a level of discipline and organization. It’s also lovely to receive a handwritten note. It feels personal because it is personal. Someone has taken the time to write and not just zip off an email.

In the meantime, I’m just grateful that my appalling handwriting doesn’t get me into the following kind of trouble:

In 1636 an employee of the East India Company in London wrote to a colleague in India asking that he ‘send me by the next ship 2 or 3 apes.’ Unfortunately – his letter ‘r’ in the word OR caused some confusion. As a result, he received 80 monkeys, together with a note saying that the remaining 123 would be with him shortly.

What about your handwriting? Please share and shame mine.

SHADOWS OF THE PAST, Part Two

by Miko Johnson

We may be writers but we’re also observers, and I’ve observed that one picture can be worth a thousand words.

In my previous post, which covered my time in Prague and Poland, I promised to follow up with my trip to France, and how it influenced both my writing, and my life. It began with a trip to Paris ten years earlier, when my husband and I stumbled onto an exhibition at the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judiasme, or MahJ for short. It featured political drawings and prints from Abel Pann, an artist who executed a series of drawings based on the pogroms carried out by soldiers on the Eastern Front during the First World War. His work covered the early 20^th century.

Most broke my heart. They showed mothers and little children hiding behind barns, or cowering inside their homes, with captions like Quick, run and hide! One of his later drawings showed an elderly Jewish man hanging from the gallows while Nazi soldiers watch with amusement. The caption: Honoring the brave WWI veteran. It made me think of my grandfather, whom I never met. A German soldier wounded in the Great War, he was taken to Auschwitz and never seen again. That’s when I decided to dedicate my fourth book to him.

I mentioned in my earlier post the dejection I saw in the people of Bytom, Poland, a former mining town largely ignored by the EU. Images of An Other Europe, another photographic exhibit Allan and I saw in Prague, influenced that observation.

Photographer Constantin Pittas traveled to seventeen countries throughout Europe in the mid- to late-1980s, capturing people in the streets of cities. His stated goal was to “prove that Europe is one entity”.

I believe he failed. Not that his work wasn’t fascinating, but I could tell which side of the Iron Curtain he’d taken photographs by the faces and body language of the people. As in Bytom, I saw desolation throughout the Communist bloc images. In one photo, used for the brochure cover, a middle-aged man walks along a street alone toward the camera at twilight. Bag in hand, his head is tilted down to watch his step, figuratively and literally.

I don’t see joy, or serenity, or even concern in his face. Only resignation. I’d recognized the Charles Bridge in the background so I knew this had been taken in Prague, but based on the other photographs, I had no doubt the location fell behind the Iron Curtain.

Many more showed similar images of people, their emotions constrained. Women standing on line at the market, an elderly woman sitting on a bench. Don’t ask, don’t tell, at least in places like Romania, Hungary, Armenia. People looked so different in Western Europe, where their faces bore the full range of emotions, whether young folks sunbathing on a Mediterranean beach or an elderly Portuguese woman gazing at a drunk lying in the street with a mixture of pity and disgust.

I kept returning to two images, each showing a different young woman with a little smile playing on her lips. In one, the woman sits at the counter of a Parisian café, enjoying a coffee. In the other, the woman turns to glance at a man she’s with. The pure pleasure behind the smile of the coffee drinker, compared to the sadness in the eyes of the woman presumably in love, was strikingly evident.

A series of photos the photographer had taken at the end of his journey, in Berlin, were especially moving. Pittas fortuitously found himself there in 1989, when the wall fell.

There, past and present collided, and confusion mixed with elation as people tried to grasp what had happened.

However, the photographic image that has stayed with me the longest came from a different time.

Photograph by Constantine Pittas, from exhibition at Clam Gallasův Palác, Prague

After Eastern Europe we continued to Toulouse, France. One of my goals was to visit the Musee de la Resistance & de la Deportation, where I’d hoped to find background information for my current WIP, which covers the years around the second World War. The museum’s focus should be obvious even if you don’t understand French. Despite going through the museum with the objective eye of a researcher, I found it dark and disturbing, until I found this photograph:

Need I say more?

Photograph from the collection of Musee de la Resistance & de la Deportation, Toulouse, France

After Toulouse we spent the final days of our trip in Paris. We’d last stayed there six months before Notre Dame caught fire, and caught a heartbreaking glimpse of the ruined cathedral in 2022. While meandering through the city we once again found a photographic exposition of the decimation of one neighborhood during the Nazi occupation. Heartbreaking, we thought as we approached the cathedral. What other sad sight awaited us. We turned the corner and saw this:

Progress. And hope. A balm for the soul.

Miko Johnston, a founding member of The Writers in Residence, is the author of the historical fiction series, “A Petal in the Wind”, as well as a contributor to several anthologies including the about-t0-be-released “Whidbey Island: An Insider’s Guide”. Miko lives in Washington (the big one) with her rocket scientist husband. Contact her at mikojohnstonauthor@gmail.com

.This article by M. Johnston was posted by Jackie Houchin

Writers Collaborating: How does it work?

By Jill Amadio

Co-authors, such as the several collaborators who write with bestselling James Patterson, are freely acknowledged by the thriller writer, and he gives them public credit for their work. Is there also an increasing trend for mystery writers to team up? One successful couple, Greg Wands and Elizabeth ‘Liz’ Keenan, are finding their books more and more popular, and sell in twelve languages. Here they explain how their writing process works:

What are your writing backgrounds? Were you published before collaborating?

Greg: Liz and I both wrote short fiction separately for many years, and I tried my hand at screenwriting. While we were early readers and supporters of each other’s work, it wasn’t until our debut, The Woman Inside, in 2019 that either of us became published authors, and it was a real thrill to be able to do it together!

How did you decide to collaborate and why crime?

Greg: We’d been discussing the idea of collaborating on a project together in the abstract for many years when we both suffered separate tragedies: my father passing away from cancer and Liz having a long-term relationship unravel in heartbreaking fashion. While supporting each other through the grief and trauma, we cooked up the seed of the idea that became our debut novel. A crime story seemed like the proper genre, as we were interested in exploring the more clandestine aspects of the human condition and the capacity people have for secrecy and deception.

What system do you use to organize and collaborate?

Greg: We write in Google Docs, which allows both of us to work on the manuscript simultaneously. As a duo, this helps when we’re in the revision or copy edit phases and often need to tackle separate plot points in a complementary fashion.

Which strengths and weaknesses do you each bring to the writing?

Greg: Liz is wonderful at scene setting, character development, and creating a visceral experience for the reader through the use of a specific image, textural description, or the like. And she’s marvelous with a turn of phrase! I enjoy writing dialogue, and would like to think I’m good at creating atmosphere. I think we’re also both skilled at being able to nudge the other in the right direction when one of us starts to lose the thread of the plot or makes a narrative decision that feels untrue to a character.

How have you changed or adjusted your system as you wrote more books?

Greg: We fell into our routine fairly organically, by volleying chapters back and forth with only a loose framework in place. This seemed to give the work an improvisatory energy that kept each of us–and by extension, the reader–on their toes. Thankfully, we’ve been able to keep our formula reasonably intact, which works well for us. With a couple of the books, the publisher has requested a more comprehensive breakdown, but we still find ways to surprise and confound one another on the page, to our mutual delight.

Which obstacles/pitfalls/challenges did you face in the writing of the books? Arguments? Agreements?

Greg: It can be a bit of a challenge having two separate brains tackling one story, mostly from a logistical point of view: keeping timelines straight, having slightly different ideas behind character motivations, and trying to foresee where your writing partner might take the plot of the book. But the uncertainty can also be thrilling, and lend to the feeling of discovery and surprise that makes for an engaging writing experience.

Do you think having two writers can shorten the length it takes to write a book?

Greg: Because we write in a back-and-forth style, with one author penning a chapter and then kicking it over to the other, it takes about the same amount of time to finish a draft as it would a solo writer. The advantage we have is that our method allows for extra time in between chapters to clean up the text and to find places where we may have slipped into some inconsistency or other in the plotting of the story.

Your separate backgrounds appear tailor-made for a collaboration. Have your experiences in publishing and screenwriting helped you write, publish, and market your books?

Liz: Our respective backgrounds have given us several useful tools. Our experiences in the film and publishing industries have informed our understanding of effective storytelling, audience, and the publishing process. For marketing, our past experience has helped us to succinctly pitch our books and connect with influencers and other writers in and out of our genre, as well as our understanding of how much authors have to be entrepreneurial when it comes to marketing their books.

Who does the research?

Liz: Since we typically split up the characters in writing our novels, we research our designated parts and their history, professions, passions, etc. For the broader story elements like forensic and legal procedures, we also split research and share our findings, which often spur new story elements in our plotting. We pick themes and story elements we are interested in learning more about, knowing we’ll spend six months to a year immersing ourselves in these topics.

What is your publishing history?

Liz: Our first novel, The Woman Inside came out in January (2019), and the following year, In Case of Emergency was published (2020), and The Rule of Three was released in 2022. We have a fourth novel publishing in 2024. Our books are all published by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Random House

Either of you writing other books, fiction or non-fiction, that are non-collaborative?

Liz: Yes! We are both working on novels separately in between our collaborative projects. They are in various degrees of completion; Greg is further along than I am!

Which of your books did you have the most enjoyment writing?

Liz: Each of our novels has brought immense joy in the writing process in different ways. If I had to pick one, I think The Woman Inside was the most exhilarating to write since it was the first, the most personally motivated, and we were doing something completely new.

Most effective marketing strategy?

Liz: This is a hard one since effective marketing is so elusive. However, the approach with the most ‘legs’ is personal recommendations from fellow thriller writers and bookstagrammers of our books when they are released. The trust of readers that these well-read influencers and writers have fostered is priceless and effective in spreading the word about our work, and we are eternally grateful to the people who support us in that way. We aim to do the same with all of the incredible books that are published each month!

Advice for budding collaborators?

Liz: Like any healthy relationship, creative collaborators should focus on the foundation of the partnership as much (if not more) than the creative output. Communication, trust, and encouragement are vital to keeping momentum when things get creatively challenging. Making the work an extension of the friendship is the core of our collaboration; we write for the amusement and shock of the other, which keeps us motivated. Laughter is essential, too.

###

This interview by Jill Amadio was posted by Jackie Houchin.