Peg Herring's Blog - Posts Tagged "writing"

I've given myself a week to get it all together. I've long nown that I do best with a deadline. They're natural for teachers, because every hour of the day is at least one. For a writer, there are plenty of deadlines as well, but not always when you need them. I've got plenty going on: two books coming out soon, one edited and in need of promotion; one whose editing hangs over my head like that sword in mythology (When will they send it back? How much will they want it changed? How much time will they give me to get it done?)

So I know I should be finishing the WIP, getting it into some sort of shape for readers to begin gnawing at its edges. And there's the rub: I have no deadline for that. I can set it aside for a dozen reasons...especially when the going gets tough.

So there: I'm announcing to the world that I WILL finish it this week and present it to my first reader next Tuesday.

Stay tuned for a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth.

I know not what path others may take, but as for me, it's the same path, over and over. As I write, I leave big holes, but as I edit, again and again, they fill themselves in almost as a matter of course. As big problems are solved, smaller ones come to light and get their turn for my full attention. It's the fourth time through that I see a tiny event that deepens the bad girl's motivation and makes her more realistic. On the sixth time it might be an incident that, added to the main plot, diverts the reader and allows for a bigger surprise at the end. And it's the tenth time through that the phrasing smooths out, making each character sound like himself, different from all the others.

It's how I work, and it's how I know I'm no Mozart, just a writer who has to work really hard to get better.

You can't go out and rake those leaves with the wind blowing.
You can't finish sorting the stuff in the garage into give-away, throw-away and put-away piles with the rain and the damp.
You can't go for a walk. Well, you could, but you'd be wet and miserable in five minutes.


You might as well write something.

There isn't enough time in the day. You all know I'm hard at work on the sequel to HER HIGHNESS, which is moving at a snail's pace for some reason. But then I get into my old computer files for some reason and stumble onto other projects, some barely started, some almost done.

Gee, that was a good idea. Why didn't I finish it? Oh, right. I was stuck on motive. Oh, and that one's nice, too. I was going to work on the characters, get them some depth. Oh, that clever idea for a plot still seems clever; I just need to write down what's in my head. And look at that one, ninety percent done, but the original is still under consideration at some publishing house, so I stopped working on Book Two until Book One sells.

Then there are family and friends. "When do we get a sequel to MACBETH'S NIECE?" shows up on Facebook. And someone else mentions "that one you told me about with the crippled girl. That sounded good." And one family member is still waiting patiently for me to finish the one she and I talked about for weeks.

So why don't I finish? Because writing takes waaaaaaay longer than people think. Which brings me back to my original statement: There isn't enough time in the day.

It's time to share what I hate about the Christmas season, and I make no excuses for it.

I hate decorating. In late fall my friends and acquaintances start talking about "doing" the house, some with anticipation, some with resignation. I refuse. I don't like the clutter, I don't enjoy the disruption, and I see no reason to turn my house into a wannabe Wal-Mart.

I realize this might put me in the grinch category, but otherwise I do okay. I arrange and conduct a huge Christmas concert for my town every year. I support causes and caring during holiday drives. I work to find just the right present for everyone on my list. I even enjoy the holiday decorations put up by businesses, municipalities and ambitious homeowners. I just don't like decorating my own house.

That's one cool thing about being a writer: I can say "I don't have time to decorate. I have a deadline." And everyone tiptoes away.

I can't do it. I envy those who can.

I will admit that as a playwright, I wrote some things that were funny. But in my novels, nobody's going to laugh out loud.

I note this because I started reading a friend's MS last night and I did...laugh out loud. She has the knack of being funny without being silly, and entertaining without stooping to farce, which irritates me. I was never a fan of the Lucille Ball-type heroine, so overdrawn and asinine that I wanted to slap her. My friend's small-town heroine is sharp-minded and sarcastic, but on the inside, where she keeps up a running commentary on the ironies of American life. Unlikely to buck the system, she recognizes its weaknesses, and the reader gets the benefit of her sardonic observations in just a few words: that feeling of "here we go again" as we deal with personalities and situations we meet today and will see again tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

I think it's hard to balance murder and comedy, so when I find an author who does it well, I am particularly thrilled. In one of life's odd moments, I met this author at a booksigning of another author (Deb Baker) whose comical Yooper mysteries made me laugh. Deb introduced me to Janet Koch, and we started swapping MSs for editing purposes. The one I'm reading now is due for publication in September, 2010. I'll be sure to remind everyone when that date is closer, because if you like humor in your mysteries, it's a keeper.

My mother, an elementary teacher, once had a student hand in homework that stymied her for a few moments. All the true-false, multiple choice, and short answer responses were correct, but all the essay questions were answered with the phrase "Answers will vary." She finally figured out that during recess, while she was on hall duty, the kid had swiped her teacher's edition from the desk, copied what was written there onto his paper, and then put the book back.

What I've been thinking of as I edit my friend MS is that although she doesn't write like I do, she writes very well. I'm sure when she reads my work, she notices differences in things like sentence structure, syntax, and character development. What's nice about our arrangement is we've both got a reader who can acknowledge that different isn't necessarily inferior. I suppose that's the tough part of editing, not trying to turn every author into a clone of what the editor thinks is good writing. It all adds up to style, and when an author's got it, I'm okay with it. "Answers will vary".

Don't ask me where these things come from, but I started wondering this morning why we keep the soy sauce behind the dish soap and the teriyaki sauce in a different area, next to the cinnamon. No logic there, merely an unconscious decision at some point in the past that became habit and now is required. I can imagine either my husband or I bellowing to the other, "Where have you put the soy sauce?" if it were to end up somewhere else.

That's how my files are, too. Everything is stored in some spot that was intuitive once upon a time but now can be puzzling to the point of craziness. Why did I file some librarians' addresses under "Contacts" and others under "Speaking"? How did minutes for the local alumni association end up in the folder entitled "Her Highness"? And why did I keep thirty copies of the same letter, the only difference being the inside addresses for last year's trip to Florida?

It should be remedied. It's frustrating to hunt for things and try to guess what I called them, where I thought they belonged, whether I even kept them at all. I need a system...a BETTER system. I need to take the time to get organized, delete junk, correlate information, and streamline everything.

But then, I'll probably never move the soy sauce, either.

My aunt, the last surviving member of her generation, is 95. When I asked her about family history so I could write it down and preserve it, her response was, "Who cares? That's the past."

I got a review yesterday from a woman who loved HER HIGHNESS, but she prefaced her praise with the comment that she almost didn't read it (she won an ARC) because historicals are boring.

Obviously, I'm of a different sort. I love history, not so much the sweep of politics and armies and civilization, but the details of what people did and why. I just read an article about a Scots couple who languished in a dungeon for months because they wouldn't tell Cromwell's men where the honors of Scotland (a crown, scepter, and sword) were hidden. The wife died there, but neither revealed the secret.

I believe that people are people, no matter what their time and place. I'm sure that, although I have trouble imagining myself dying for some pieces of metal, somewhere in the world right now, someone is suffering in a similar way for something that means more to him than life, just as those people did long ago. History (and herstory too) tells us not just who they were, but who we are. It's only bad writing that makes it boring.

One problem I face as a mystery writer (and reader) is how smart the protagonist gets to be. Even when I was a kid I knew that Sherlock Holmes was often way off in his self-proclaimed "logical deductions". Saying that a man's wife no longer loves him because his coat has a loose button is beyond ridiculous, and such Holmes moments have been spoofed many times by comedians better at it than I.

But here's the thing with mysteries: writers have to make leaps sometimes to make the story work. The cop has to have a gut instinct that tells him he's on the right track, so he zeroes in on one suspect out of the twenty possibles. The detective has to be better than everyone else at putting the pieces together and finding a solution, so she sees the connection between victims that everyone else has missed all these months. The amateur sleuth has to make a leap from "it could be anyone" to "what about this guy?" , picking up on some small detail that sets him on his often bumbling path to the story's climax.

The author's job is to make these moments palatable for the reader, so everyone goes along, takes the jump, and makes it to the other side. It's one of the mystery writer's most difficult tasks: if the gap's too big, the reader can't or won't span it. If it's too small, the reader's way ahead and eventually wanders off to look for something more interesting. And if your crucial clue is that the dog didn't bark, well, good luck with that.