Month: July 2024

The Case of The Runaway Bride

By Jill Amadio

Outraged at my character deciding to get herself murdered far too early in my mystery, I was also furious that she had the temerity to go out on her own and run off with my carefully organized plot. She wasn’t actually a bride, but she sure was a runaway. And a female.

How dare she!  I had barely sorted out a new setting and spent time researching a lonely location in the UK when this forward young woman opted out of my book. Not only had she escaped from my timeline, but she was also in the wrong place.

Her impulsive decision and demise threw two other characters, one the murderer, into complete confusion. I almost felt them turning to me and saying, “Now what?”

Keeping control of one’s fictional characters is usually a given. Like chess pieces, the author can move them here and there with impunity. We can, and often do, change people and places around but the decision has to be the writer’s.

Something similar happened to me once before. In my second mystery, I knew who the killer was, and I looked forward to her denouement. However, the more I wrote her, the more I came to like her. The upshot was I had to choose a different character as the murderer and thus change his gender and personality, to say nothing of his traits and habits.

However, my runaway person really put me over a barrel with her unexpected death. Should I write her out completely? Force her to stay alive a little longer? What did her early, unplanned demise mean to the rest of the storyline, the remaining characters, and my peace of mind?

It seemed that the best thing to do was to move the chapter in which she wrote herself gone forever to the end of my Word document so that I wouldn’t have to look at that chapter until l I decided where to fit it in, given the new circumstances.

Actually, I knew exactly where and when I wanted her to meet her end, but her decision to die on her own terms threw me into disarray. To say nothing of writer’s block.

I perused my synopsis, wondering if I should wedge her in where she wanted to be, but again, it was clear that her interference meant a lot more work. I would have to rearrange people and places, maybe add a new character and perhaps an extra victim, if any of her shenanigans were to make sense.

Another thought – must I re-think my POV? In order to get her back in line, would she be satisfied with being re-written in first? Her dramatic demise certainly was a plea for help. On the other hand, I had envisioned and written her with poor eyesight and she wore glasses. How did that affect the decision to off herself?  Was she too vain to wish to continue as one of my characters? I saw my authority begin to dissolve.

So, in a heroic effort to re-establish and re-claim my jurisdiction – after all, she was supposedly my creation – I finally decided I needed to be very firm with her. She could not just go around deciding how, when, and where to become the center of the action. What if others followed her lead?

Ah! Maybe that was her problem. She felt like a minor character rather than a major one. She wanted more attention. Still, offing herself hardly seemed the way to go about it since, once she was dead, she had no way to enjoy the fruits of her action. I’d not planned for her to play a prominent part. I guess she realized she was definitely not the important character she thought she deserved to be.

Again, I had a lightbulb moment. Therein lay the danger of a runaway character. They imagine they have a more significant role in the plot or a different personality than the author provides. Writers know that characters make a story. When your fictional book people populate your imagination and come alive their actions determine the story.

Readers want to be swept away into the life of a character. This silly woman ruined that purpose. I was sorely tempted to discard any reference to her and replace her with a male.

As I continued to figure out what to do, I began to question my understanding of human nature. Then I remembered that this runaway lady was not human but a creation—an AI. Perhaps my fellow Residence writers can suggest a solution. Am I being a Pollyanna?

Finding Time to Write: a “Flashback” Post from 15 years ago. Still True?

by Jacqueline Vick

Some writers snatch a few moments of time wherever they find it. Others adhere to strict schedules. Walter Mosley tells us to write every day. Peter Brett wrote his first novel on his smartphone during his daily travels on the F train. Do you follow a set writing schedule? Write every day? Have a favorite writing spot? Do you put ‘butt to chair’ until you’ve finished a specific word count? Tell us about your writing schedule.

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Writers Write by Bonnie Schroeder

I try (emphasis on “try”) to write every day first thing in the morning — okay, I feed the dogs and make coffee first and then retreat to my desk with one dog underfoot and one cat in my lap. On my desk, I have a kitchen timer that I set for one hour. Some days, I actually write for the full hour before the phone rings or the other cat barfs or my stomach starts growling. Some days I have to stop the timer until the aforementioned distractions are dealt with; then I try to finish the hour later on. I don’t always make my goal, but occasionally, I actually exceed it.

For me, the important thing is to try for it every day — weekends included. It keeps the circuits open and the muse engaged. When I worked at a job 50 miles away with a two-plus hour daily commute, there were times when I could only manage 15 minutes a day, so an hour is a huge luxury for me now. But even with those quarter-hour writing sessions, I finished the draft of a novel. It took a few years, but that daily contact with the pages kept them in my mind and kept me plugged into the current. And that, to me, is the secret: write something every day, even if it’s just a paragraph or even a sentence. Then I can legitimately say, “I’m a writer.”

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Lucky by Jacqueline Vick

I’m extremely lucky. I was able to quit my day job to pursue writing full-time. (Well, writing AND homemaking full time.) That means that every morning when I rise, my day is my own and my schedule is whatever I want. Sounds great, doesn’t it? There are a few downsides.

When I’m working on a novel manuscript, there is no boss handing me deadlines, no client with a specific need to fill. I have to set all of those goals myself…and keep them. Repercussions can be a wonderful motivator; without them, it’s more difficult to stay on course.

My deadlines consist of “finish the first draft by May 1st.” I’m always happy to find a short story contest, because that gives me a specific deadline and specific criteria to meet.

Yesterday, I was talking to my brother, who is a personal coach, and he said that the difficulty most people run into is keeping promises to themselves. They don’t value their own time and their own goals as much as they value other people’s time and goals. I’m starting to get around this by setting more specific goals and deadlines and then pretending that I work for a fabulous author named Jacqueline Vick. She has high expectations, and I don’t want to disappoint her. I imagine her asking me to have the rewrites on chapter one on her desk by Friday. It’s a bit kooky, but it works.

I write every day, including weekends. My butt is in the chair for about 8 hours on weekdays, a few hours here and there on Saturday and Sunday. I write in the only place available to me–the dining room table. It’s a pain to keep cleaning off the table each night, but the thought of my husband reaching around a stack of papers for the pepper mill helps keep me organized.

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Writing Away by Jackie Houchin

For an organized, everything-in-its-place kind of person, my writing schedule is very haphazard and irregular. I mostly write when a deadline looms, so I’m thankful I have those. I write reviews for magazines and articles for a newspaper and newsletters. If I don’t get my copy in, it doesn’t get printed, and I don’t get paid. Simple as that, and no amount of boo-hoo’ing will fix it. The next issue already looms on the horizon.

If I were to write a book, I fear I would find myself writing franticly for 23 hours every day during the last weeks before the agent/editor/publisher’s scheduled deadline. I admire my fellow Wonder Women, who persistently and faithfully write for months and even years to bring their creations into the world. Their ultimate satisfaction will far outshine my instant bursts of pride.

So which style is best? “Whatever works for you.” Yeah, you’ve heard that before, but it’s true. Whether it’s dedicating specific minutes, hours, and days to craft a novel or franticly writing and rewriting and “ripping the paper out of a typewriter” before rushing it to an editor…it doesn’t matter. If our words, opinions, ideas, and stories are read (sooner or later), well, that’s what counts.

That’s my opinion, and I’m sticking to it. Now, let’s see… when’s my next deadline?

PS: Where do I write? Either at my dinosaur desktop PC in my office until the “backside” can’t stand sitting anymore, or more recently, standing at the breakfast bar in the corner of my kitchen with a 6-foot cat tree behind me (usually occupied by three cats lounging and looking over my shoulder, and trying to foil my thought processes with their diabolical purring and mind games) while I pound away on my laptop.

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“Finding Time to Write,” from June 2009, was reposted by Jackie Houchin.

Photo by Andrey Grushnikov: 

“Off The Top”

by Jackie Houchin

What do I mean when I say, “off the top of my head…”?

Dictionaries say it means derived from the knowledge you have in your memory or impromptu, without previous thought or preparation.

Does it mean the same as “seat of my pants”?  Hmm. We often say we are “pantsers” when we sit down and start writing a story without a formal outline.

Although I love outlines, pages of notes, and lists of resources, I often sit down and simply start writing. Some call this ‘free writing,’ and it sometimes begins with a prompt. I did that recently with a short story I wrote using the prompt “The Convenience Store Was a Sad Place.”  That prompt made me think of our neighborhood store and gas station. I pictured myself walking into that store, looking around, dealing with a smarty-pants cashier, and away I wrote. The story came to me in a series of vivid mind pictures.

Was it seat-of-my-pants? Or something “derived from the knowledge I had in my memory.” Hmmm.

More recently, in April, to be exact, I joined a month-long Writers Digest PAD Challenge. The idea was to write a Poem-A-Day (PAD) on the daily prompt they gave. You could write any type of poem, from a limerick to a sonnet or free verse.  (I liked the shortness of this challenge.)

I did it. For nineteen days, at least. And the poems were totally “off the top of my head.”

April 1 – An optimistic poem.

There once was a gal with a lump.

When first it was found, she did jump.

“Oh, my! I shall die!”

Was her terrified cry!

But a doctor cut out that bad bump.

 

April 3 – A sad poem.

The rosebud is gone.

Cut from a lily-white breast.

Warm tears down the drain.

 

April 4 – A mistake poem, one you made or witnessed.

The mistake was mine. I’ll confess

I love whodunnits. But I digress.

I put down the fiver. I looked away

Hmm, stab or shoot? Which way to slay?

Wait! I’m not stealing a book!

Look in my bag? Really, just look!

There’re TWO books by Christie???

Well, I declare. It IS a mystery.

 

April 8 – A major event poem.

I gasp and stutter and lisp,

For today, I saw an eclipse.

The sun was gone

But not for long

It returned; its edges all crisp.

 

Off the top of my head – derived from knowledge I have in my memory.

It was fun for those nineteen days last April. There were longer poems, too, and some more serious.  I’ve often said I’m a short writer. I don’t think I could actually write a book, although I’ve tried.  I admire the Writers In Residence here on this blog for doing just that!

Do you write short or long?  Off the top of your head or from detailed outlines?

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If you want to see more of my PAD poems, go to my blog, Words and Reviews, and scroll down the right-hand side column to April 2024. 

In the week before June ended, there was a 7-day challenge by Writers’ Digest for personal essays. Again, you have a topic, and you write about it.  My first one was about “a job experience,” and I titled it “Knick-knack, Paddywhack, Give A Dog a Bone.”  You can find that one on my blog site at: Words and Reviews Essays. 

Big Words, Bad Words

By Maggie King

Many years ago I read a mystery with so many words I didn’t know that I had to keep my dictionary close at hand. As I enjoy learning new words I liked the experience the popular author provided. But when I mentioned it to a couple of friends, they said, “Not me. I’d have put that book down, and fast. I want to read words I already know.”

I’ve always had a love of words. I fondly remember vocabulary lists in high school: perspicacious, truculent, vapid, loquacious, polemic, specious, logy. With all those big words swirling through my brain, you’d think my SAT scores would have been more impressive than they were.

When I presented my manuscript for Murder at the Book Group (my debut, published in 2014) to a long-ago critique group, the members advised me to ditch the big words. “What big words?” I asked, bewildered. They named a few but the one that stuck with me was “diatribe.” I didn’t consider diatribe a big word and it would surely be understood in context, as in “Arthur ignored his mother and carried on with his diatribe against Evan.”

The upshot was that I kept diatribe, but changed some of the other “big” words.

A word I recall from reading Nancy Drew was “elated,” as in “Nancy was elated by the news.” The context wasn’t clear, so I ran to the dictionary and learned that Nancy was ecstatically happy by the news. Elated is a wonderful word to teach a ten-year-old.

One of my favorite books on writing is On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King. In the book, King says, “Wherever your vocabulary is at today is fine. There’s no need to learn more words or different words. Whatever words you know right now, you use. This will help you develop your voice and sound unique.”

Is using big words in a story a good idea? In my opinion, the answer is yes—as long as the writer chooses words whose meaning and context is easily understood. A thesaurus is a great tool, but don’t use it to come up with words you think sound cool and sophisticated. Readers have a wide range of word knowledge but even those with an impressive vocabulary feel that showing it off is pretentious.

To sum it up: use your best judgment.

In the meantime, I’ll hang on to my precious dog-eared copy of 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary and see how many of the words I learn end up in my writing. Ceraunophobia, anyone?

To swear or not to swear?


Do your characters swear? Do they swear too much? Not enough? Should they swear at all?

Personally, I don’t get exercised over swearing. Let’s face it, people swear—some a little, some a lot, some only when “necessary.” Swearing can add a touch of realism to our writing (after all, what does one say when tripping over a dead body?). We’ve all known colorful folks who liberally season their conversations with salty words. For one story, I created a character loosely based on a former co-worker who never felt the need to censor her speech. Not a word of it.

But my readers object to profanity and I must respect their wishes. There are ways to suggest swearing and author Naomi Hirahara is so skilled at this that you know the exact word she’s not using. Another author, F.M. Meredith, has this to say about the lack of salty language in her Rocky Bluff P.D. series: “Oh, the characters do cuss, I just don’t quote them.”

Here are ways I’ve suggested swearing in my stories: She shrieked a litany of curse words; She continued to scream and curse …; He included a few four-letter words of a sexist nature; Donna slurred a few non-PG13 adjectives to describe her feelings for her ex; Kat cursed a blue streak (I wouldn’t choose this one again, as it’s a cliché that sneaked past me and my editor).

On several occasions I’ve presented a seminar/webinar on dialogue and tackled the question of profanity. This is how I answered the question “To swear or not to swear?”:

• Know your reader and your genre. Cursing and four-letter words are more acceptable in a thriller than in a romance or a cozy mystery.
• Refrain from profanity in narrative, but an occasional expletive in dialogue is acceptable (depending, of course, on genre).
• Realize that profanity is more noticeable in a novel than it is in real-life conversation.

Again, use your best judgment. And ask your beta readers for feedback.

Your thoughts?