Lea Wait's Blog, page 172

Dogs. Snow. Mary Oliver.

[image error]My dog, Raven is rolling in the snow. With wild abandon she’s tossing it over her head and rubbing it all over her body in a snow massage. I am jealous.

Animal gladness is a fine thing and I am so grateful I found Mary Oliver’s hymns to dogs. Dog Songs: Poems.

Mary Oliver was an American poet who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In 2007 The New York Times described her as “far and away, this country’s best-selling poet.”

Mary is known for her astounding, deeply seen and deeply felt exploration of the natural world as it sinks into her soul and life. (And our souls and lives.)

With hope readers discover this volume (and all Mary’s works) and because Raven is rolling in the snow, and because there’s weeks and weeks of winter left for all dogs to do that … here’s my tribute to Mary Oliver.[image error]

(Sandy note: I can only share bits of her work, but I hope you find it all.)

“A dog can never tell you what she knows from the smells of the world, but you know, watching her, that you know almost nothing.”

 

“The Storm (Bear)”

… he spins

until the white snow is written upon

in large exuberant letters,

… a long sentence, expressing

The pleasure of the body in this world.

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“Luke”

I had a dog

who loved flowers.

Briskly she went

through the fields,

yet paused

for the honeysuckle

or the rose,

… the way

we long to be—

that happy

in the heaven of earth—

that wild, that loving.[image error]

 

“The Sweetness of Dogs”

…I am for the moon’s

perfect beauty and also, oh! how rich

it is to love the world. Percy, meanwhile,

leans against me and gazes up

into my face. As though I were just as wonderful

as the perfect moon.

 

[image error]From the book’s essay, “Dog Talk”

“…I have seen Ben place his nose meticulously

into the shallow dampness of a deer’s hoofprint and shut his eyes as if listening. But it is smell he is listening to. The wild, high music of smell, that we know so little about. … Dog is one of the messengers of that rich and still magical first world. The dog would remind us of the pleasures of the body with its graceful physicality, and the acuity and rapture of the senses, and the beauty of forest and ocean and rain and our own breath. There is not a dog that romps and runs but we learn from him.”[image error]

 

“Benjamin, Who Came From Who Knows Where”

What shall I do?

When I pick up the broom

      he leaves the room. …

Then he’s back, and we

       hug for a long time.

 

My dog Raven is a rescue dog. Like Mary Oliver’s dog Benjamin in the previous poem, her early years were obviously not happy. There was suffering. She’s happy now, rolling in the snow. Dear Mary Oliver, I am sending my Raven poem out to you …[image error]

“Raven’s Crate”

Raven is bending her head

into a hard corner of the living room.

The rest of her long, black, sleek body

lies relaxed on the floor.

She gazes at me with eyes almost as dark as

her coat.

“This is the way I lay in my small crate before

I came to live with you

and love you. But I still need to feel it hard

on my neck. Sometimes.”

(Pics: decades of my dogs in snow.)

website.   The second Mystery in Maine, “Deadly Turn,” will be published in 2019.

ANNA, IDA B., AND MARY

Susan Vaughan here. When I was growing up, I remember studying women’s efforts to gain the right to vote. The suffragettes I read about in history class were Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Julia Ward Howe and others—who were all white. None of those older books told the stories of Black women’s efforts toward citizenship and voting rights. I thought about saving this post for March, Women’s History Month, but it seems appropriate now too. In this Black History Month, I’d like to honor three of the many suffragette heroines who were African American.

I learned about several in These Truths: a History of the United States (W.W. Norton, 2018) by award-winning historian Jill Lepore. She examines the “American experiment” through the lens of how the country lives up to the ideals of its founders. She says this in the preface: “The American experiment rests on these truths, Jefferson called them—political equality, natural rights and the sovereignty of the people.” I’m drawing on this book and other sources for this post.

[image error]First, a little background. The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, adopted in 1868, granted citizenship rights to all “persons” born in the United States. Ratified in 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment granted the right to vote to Black men. Neither white nor Black women were considered “persons,” who were citizens, nor could they vote until the nineteenth amendment was ratified in 1920. After the Civil War, woman suffrage supporters began organizing and forming official associations to fight for both citizenship and voting rights. The National American Woman Suffrage Association took a state-by-state approach to gaining the vote. But this movement by white women excluded African American women. Often Black women worked in their own clubs and suffrage associations.

Anna Julia Cooper, born into slavery in 1858 in North Carolina became an author, educator, speaker, Black Liberation activist, and one of the most prominent African-American scholars of her time. She made many speeches calling for civil rights and women’s rights. Her book, A Voice from the South, was one of the first arguments for black feminism. She is best known for emphasizing to Black women that they required the ballot to counter the belief that Black men’s experiences and needs were the same as theirs. She was honored in 2009 by having her image on a postage stamp.

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Ida B. Wells, the daughter of former slaves, was born in Mississippi in 1862. In 1883, while working as a schoolteacher, she was riding in what was termed “the ladies’ car” of a train, when she was told to move to the car for Blacks. She refused, filed a court suit, and began writing for Black newspapers, eventually being elected secretary of the Black-run National Press Association. In the late nineteenth century, along with Anna Julia Cooper, Frederick Douglass, and others, she led an anti-lynching campaign. She organized the Alpha [image error]Suffrage Club among Black women in Chicago. She and other members went to Washington, D.C. in 1913 to participate in a suffrage parade, but the white organizers insisted they march at the end of the parade. Ida B. Wells refused to march at all. But later during the parade, she slipped into the white Illinois delegation and marched between two white women. When she published her first book, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, in 1892, Frederick Douglass wrote a testimonial, declaring “his voice was feeble by comparison.”

Activist Mary Church Terrell was born in 1863 in Tennessee. She graduated in 1884 from Oberlin College as one of the first African American women to attend that school, the first [image error]college to accept African Americans and female students. She taught at Wilberforce College in Ohio and the M Street High School in Washington, D.C. She went on to assist in he founding of the National Association of Colored Women, which was focused on proving that Black people were worthy of honor. Harriet Tubman was also affiliated with the group. Mary Church Terrell worked for the rights of women and Black people and protested for the cause of suffrage outside the White House during Woodrow Wilson’s administration. She lived through the very beginning of the Civil Rights Movement and died a few months after the Brown v. Board of Education case was resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954.

These women and others were heroines in Black peoples’ struggle for respect and equality. I’m grateful to Jill Lepore for enlightening me by including the strife and contributions of individual Black men and women as part of her overall study of our history. I highly recommend These Truths. It’s thoroughly researched, beautifully written, and witty. So much of America’s past informs today’s issues. Regarding living up to those founding ideals, it seems clear in 2019 America is still a work in progress.

Curing Those February Writer’s Blues

Kate Flora: February is the month when I always used to go crazy. Not dangerously crazy, just irritable, grumpy, jumpy, restless, annoyed with cold and snow and being indoors crazy. Immersing myself in the writer’s life has rescued me from that. I don’t have as much time to be crazy and grouchy when I have to meet my thousand word a day quota. So now the February crazies have been replaced by a new malady, a writer’s disease called “I don’t know what happens next.”

Not knowing what happens next is fine if you’re the reader. That’s part of the fun of [image error]reading of mystery, all that “I wonder what he/she is going to do next?” Not quite as much fun when the quota hangs there, needed to be met, and the author, in this case, me, has a whole lot of stuff on the table and no idea what to do with it. Or, as I told my trainer last week when I was particularly spacy-I’ve got a mysterious pregnant woman who knocks on the door, and a bullying man in a black SUV, and he’s looking for someone with the same name as the mysterious pregnant woman, but his description is of someone else. Fine. I can write my way out of that. But then there is a private school with a cheating and hacking scandal that Thea has to sort out. Not so fine. What do I know about hacking? And then there comes a call from the Kent School, where the headmaster is in trouble again, this time for allegedly fighting with a student.

My trainer no doubt thinks I’m nuts. At this point, so do I. How am I going to follow up all these strands and make the book make sense. And then, because I don’t have enough to deal with, I introduce a mysterious box.

All in good fun, you say. It always works out, right? Yes. It does. But what you may not see while you are reading is the blood we sweat and the tears we shed. Those bald patches where I’ve pulled my hair out. That box of leftover Valentine chocolates hidden under my desk that gets raided when the going gets tough.

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This is what happens when I leave my desk and go on adventure

Sometimes, when this writer gets sick of staring at the screen, writing words, erasing them, and sick of eating chocolate and it is not yet late enough in the day for a proper daughter of New England to give herself over to drink, I do the indoor, writerly equivalent of going out to play.

I close the WIP and pull up my friend Gracie, and let her go have an adventure. Grace Christian is a somewhat wayward US Marshal who first appeared several years ago in a story published by Level Best Books called “Gracie Walks the Plank.” Gracie has voice and Gracie has attitude and it’s fun to see what she’ll think and say. After “Gracie Walks the Plank,” I wrote a second Gracie story about a battered wife and jewel heist called “All that Glitters.” Just for fun, because she’s a vacation from my other characters, I wrote “A Hole Near Her Heart,” and then Entitlements.” My most recent bout of playing hooky from quotas has led to “Black Widower,” just barely begun.

So here’s a question for other writers: Do you ever escape from your works in progress and just go write playful stories? Dark stories? Poetry? Essays?

And here’s Gracie:

All That Glitters

Sometimes she just had to get out of the office. That’s just how it was. Ex-military and six years with the Marshal’s Service, Gracie was trained to conform. She could walk the walk and talk the talk, knot her tie and shine her shoes with the best of them. She knew shit from Shinola and she could pick the bad guy out of a crowd like nobody’s business. But once in a while, the urge to misbehave overtook her. Little stuff, like wanting to slam a jelly donut up against a wall full of wanted posters or put a fart cushion on some uptight asshole’s chair. Draw her gun at an inappropriate time and caress the barrel like it was someone’s precious dick. Stuff that could escalate if she didn’t tamp it down.

When it got so bad that she was, like the guy in the Elvis song, ‘itching like a man on a fuzzy tree,’ she’d leave the office, come out here to the park, and sit on a bench. Brick wall behind her to cover her back. And the whole roiling mass of humanity before her, doing its awkward human things. Spring drew people to the park like a picnic drew ants. Drew them in exuberant hordes, people who’d peeled down and were displaying swaths of bare skin to the sun’s warmth.

The Bucket List and the …

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Hi. Barb here.

My husband I and recently went to lunch with another couple and the husband told this story.

Last year the couple went on a small tour, multi-day cruise up the Hudson River. One night the evening’s entertainment was a stop at a riverside pub where it was trivia night. The pub was noisy and full, and a lot of people weren’t paying much attention to the game, or were only good a specific categories, like “sports” but would quickly lose interest as the questions moved on to other topics. Our friends and another couple formed a team, and they were very good, giving a table of locals a run for their money.

After the game, a woman who appeared to be in her seventies came over from the locals table to congratulate our friends. She said is was wonderful to have real competition. In the conversation that followed, she said she had auditioned for Jeopardy! twice and made it all the way until right before getting selected to go on the air both times.

“Well, you can always try out again,” our friend said, meaning to be encouraging.

“Nope,” the woman said. “That’s not happening. Some people have a Bucket List. I have a F@#k It List. It’s for the stuff I’m just not going to worry about anymore.”

I loved the idea of the F@#k It List. And really, as time gets shorter and you want to hone in on those things on the Bucket List, there has to be a F@#k It List for the things that aren’t going to make the first list.

Of course, that’s true all our lives. One choice precludes another. Time slips by and the hopes and plans that made sense at one time in life no longer apply.

A friend of mine tells a story of waking up in a cold sweat the night before her oldest child left for college. While shaking her husband awake she cried, “We never went to the Grand Canyon!”

“It’s still there,” he replied.

[image error]A lot of dreams get derailed by family obligations or the necessity to earn a living. Those often don’t feel like choices when we make them, but they are. Fortunately for the functioning of society, most people make the right ones.

When you’re young, it often feels like when you have time, you don’t have money, and when you have money, you don’t have time.

When you’re older, if you’re really lucky, things may free up. Kids grow up and go off. You’ve reached your peak, however high or not it may be, in your profession, and you can begin to think about what’s on the other side of that mountain you couldn’t see over for so long.

It’s time for the Bucket List. And also the F@#k It List.

For me, publishing a novel, and publishing a series, were Bucket List items for a long time.

On the other hand, renovating our old Victorian house in Boothbay Harbor went on the F@#k It List and we sold it this winter. It was hard to let go of that dream and if things had happened in different ways at different times we might have done it. But we let it go and I think we’ll be the happier for it.

So what about you, readers? What’s on the Bucket List and what’s on the F@#k It List?

The Beauty of Life Stories, Well Told

I love a well-written obit.

In fact, the obituary section may be why I still subscribe to several newsprint papers, which, unlike their digital cousins, invite me to really read, rather than skim. That’s important when we’re talking mini life stories. Friends, mere acquaintances, total strangers—it doesn’t matter. I want to know what they invented, who they loved, how they made a difference in the world.

As a journalism student I worked at the Boston Globe, initially as a newsroom clerk (we all were called copyboys, even though by the late 1970s some of us were female).

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We wrote on these back in the day.

One of my duties was to write basic obits. When person died who was moderately famous (or infamous), at least locally, the city editor would assign whichever copyboy wasn’t otherwise occupied to gather information and write it up.

I wasn’t a reporter yet, but was striving to be, so I paid close attention to the newsroom veterans who wrote the feature obituaries. While theirs may not have been the most exciting beat, they were masters at the craft of condensing someone’s life into a respectful, sometimes funny, often poignant short story, usually on a tight deadline. I eavesdropped sometimes while they asked question after question, mining for the nugget of gold that would explain something essential about the subject’s life.

That’s where I learned the important lesson that I’ve carried over into my crime writing: detail illuminates character.

A memorable example of this is in the 2015 obituary of Leon Gorman, the grandson of L.L.Bean, who transformed that iconic Maine company from an outdoor gear store with fewer than 100 employees to a billion dollar business. His obituary talked about his business success, of course, but also about something he didn’t advertise. For a dozen years, Mr. Gorman was late to work every Wednesday because he spent the early-morning hours at Preble Street in Portland, helping to prepare and serve breakfast to hundreds of homeless folks. That telling detail has stayed with me for years.

A few weeks ago, I was moved by the obit for Bernice “Bunny” Sandler, known as the Godmother of Title IX.  After experiencing sex discrimination in the 1960s when she was told she wouldn’t be considered for a position in academia because she came on too strong for a woman, she became the driving force behind the 1972 law that barred discrimination by educational institutions that received federal funding. Title IX is most often talked about in terms of increasing opportunity for women and girls to play sports, but Bunny Sandler’s determination revolutionized the world of education on every level.

Last week, I read in the Globe about Betty Ballantine, who died at 99. Betty and her husband Ian are credited with introducing America to the paperback novel. Starting in 1939 when she was just 20 years old and he was 23, they began to import quality novels in paperback form—popular in Britain but not in the U.S.—and built the enormous market for which we writers remain grateful. Betty and Ian went on to found Bantam Books and Ballantine Books, both now part of Penguin Random House.

On my website I link to a site called Obit of the Day, an amazing compendium of stories about ordinary and extraordinary people. Readers who share my love for a good life story should hop over there and browse. An example of what you will find: On the day after Christmas in 2012, Fontella Bass, whose song Rescue Me has resonated since it first hit the charts in 1965, died after a lifetime making music. According to her obituary, it is a common misconception that Rescue Me was an Aretha Franklin song. Here’s a link to her obit, if you’d like the rest of that story and a link to the song as well: http://www.obitoftheday.com/post/39037775836/fontellabass

So here’s to the obituary writers, who manage to capture something of the essence of a person’s life in a few paragraphs, one of those thankless jobs that deserves a sincere salute.

Blog Readers: Do you read the obits? Why or why not? Please let us know in the comments.

Brenda Buchanan is the author of the Joe Gale Mystery Series, featuring a diehard Maine newspaper reporter who covers the crime and courts beat. Three books—QUICK PIVOT, COVER STORY and TRUTH BEAT—are available everywhere e-books are sold. She is writing a new series that has as its protagonist a Portland criminal defense lawyer willing to take on cases others won’t touch in a town to which she swore she would never return.

Weekend Update: February 16-17 , 2019

[image error]Next week at Maine Crime Writers, there will be posts by Brenda Buchanan (Monday), Barb Ross (Tuesday) Kate Flora (Wednesday) Susan Vaughan (Thursday), and Sandra Neily (Friday).

In the news department, here’s what’s happening with some of us who blog regularly at Maine Crime Writers:

[image error]From Kaitlyn Dunnett: From February 14-18, the Kobo edition of Kilt at the Highland Games will be on sale for 99 cents. Look for more ebook offers in the next weekend update.

 

 

 

An invitation to readers of this blog: Do you have news relating to Maine, Crime, or Writing? We’d love to hear from you. Just comment below to share.

And a reminder: If your library, school, or organization is looking for a speaker, we are often available to talk about the writing process, research, where we get our ideas, and other mysteries of the business. Contact Kate Flora

Deadline for New Novel, New Novel Coming Out, New Website & New Ideas

The snow is falling as I write this. It’s thick, wet and heavy. Somehow we’ve hit the midwinter blues. Nothing better to do than put on the coffee and settle into a writing routine. Or for you readers, settle with a good book.

The deadline for my new novel is fast pproaching and at this point I find myself in good shape. Writing under a strict deadline means that I’ve not gotten to read very many novels (sorry writer friends). But I’m feeling confident now. What started out as a worrisome piece of #£¥€ first draft has coalesced quite lnicely into a twisty psychological thriller. My only problem now is that I don’t yet have a name for my new book. Or, to be more precise, I have lots names for this novel but nothing that has struck a chord. Now I have to work with my publisher to pick out the best one.

On April 30th my new novel, PRAY FOR THE GIRL, comes out and I’m very excited for the world to meet Lucy Abbott, the gritty heroine of the novel. On the very next day I’m due to turn in my new, as-yet-to-be-named manuscript. Combine all that with the fact that I need to market the new book and set up readings and blogs, this spring should be a very busy time for this author.

I’m excited to announce my brand-spanking new website, josephsouza.net. Thanks Bob and Courissa. It’s been awhile in the making, but I’m very happy with the way it’s turned out. I’m hoping that people will sign up for my newsletter so that they can receive updates on new books and where I’ll be speaking. I promise to use this newsletter judiciously and not innundate subscribers with a barrage of useless information.

I’m just starting to develop some new ideas for novels. This process is fun but also daunting. So if you see me staring into space please know that I’m deep in thought trying to formulate the many twists and turns that make a good psychological thriller. And I’ll soon be getting back to reading all the books my writer friends have put out. Thanks for being patient, author friends. I promise I’ll get to them soon.

Meanwhile, PRAY FOR THE GIRL is on préstale and comes out April 30th. Make sure you pick up your copy today https://www.amazon.com/Pray-Girl-Joseph-Souza/dp/149671623X/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=.

USA Bestselling Author Steve Konkoly says of it, “PRAY FOR THE GIRL delivers one devilish twist after another, pulling you into the story and never letting go. A tightly paced suspense drawn with compellingly real characters, Souza’s newest domestic thriller is a genre defining tour-de-force.”

Happy winter, everyone! See you this spring. Now time to shovel.

Best,

Joe

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Give Every Character a Secret

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Deadly Edits #2 (in stores June 25)

Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson here, working on the rough draft, otherwise known as first draft, s**t draft, or “throw in everything, including the kitchen sink” draft, of the third “Deadly Edits” mystery. This is always the most challenging stage of writing for me, since I lack the ability to think very far ahead in the story. Believe me, I would love to be able to outline the plot in advance, but I’ve learned over the years that it’s far less time consuming to simply sit down and write the book. I’ll worry about making sense of it all when I revise. That’s also when I’ll make an outline. It’s soooo much easier after the fact!

What do I know in advance? I usually know who gets murdered, why, and who dunnit. I will also have given some thought to alternate suspects and their motives, and have come up with a reason why my amateur sleuth should get involved in solving the crime. She has to have a good reason, at least in her own mind.

I also try to follow a bit of good advice I first heard when I was a newbie: give every character a secret. At the time I was writing for ages 8-12, but this is one rule that works in writing books for any age group. The secrets don’t have to be big ones, just important enough to keep. The suspicion that people are hiding something is a wonderful way to complicate the plot. It may even provide an entire subplot for the novel.

The real killer is keeping at least a couple of big secrets—the murder itself and the reason behind it. Other characters may have committed some less serious crime or may not have done anything wrong at all. Some secrets may be very minor indeed. The important thing is that keeping them quiet matters. In one of my children’s mysteries, the protagonist’s mother is a college professor on sabbatical. Her secret is that she’s using her time away from academia to fulfill a lifelong dream—she’s writing a romance novel. She was wise to keep this to herself. One reviewer questioned her choice, wondering why, of all things, it had to be a romance. That pretty much made my point.

[image error]I still have some early character notes for my second mystery for ages 8-12, The Mystery of the Missing Bagpipes. I admit the premise is a bit of a stretch—a group of bagpipe enthusiasts gather at a campground in Maine to take classes and study the history of the instrument—but I was writing at a time when my husband was in a bagpipe band and spending most weekends marching in parades. The conventional wisdom is to write about what you know, right? Anyway, in this novel, the pipers have their families with them. Each of my character sheets contains information on age, hair color, eye color, height, build, and special skills, but there are also lines labeled “secret” and “reason for keeping secret.” The book opens with my preteen heroine, Kim, declaring she hates the sound of bagpipes. Her secret is that she would really like to learn to play the instrument herself, so that she can share her father’s hobby. Her new friend Shelly’s secret is that she plays the bass drum in her parents’ bagpipe band. She keeps quiet about that because she believes that Kim dislikes everything to do with pipe bands. Shelly doesn’t want to alienate her. Among the adults, the sponsor of the gathering is trying to keep his heart condition quiet. Other characters are trying to hide criminal activities. Kim’s father also has a secret. He’s planning to retire from the NYPD and move to Maine, but he doesn’t want to tell his children until things are settled. Kim’s mother is hiding the fact that she’s house hunting. Kim’s eight-year-old twin siblings don’t want to reveal that they saw someone sneaking around late at night because they were supposed to be sound asleep in bed at the time. Most of these secrets don’t fall into the category of earth-shattering revelations when they come out, but they do complicate the plot and distract my amateur sleuth from solving the crime too soon.

[image error]In writing my two current cozy mystery series, I haven’t always given every character a secret in advance, but secrets certainly have a way of cropping up as I fumble my way through the rough draft. In Vampires, Bones, and Treacle Scones, the seventh Liss MacCrimmon Mystery, I introduced a teenage character nicknamed Boxer. He was supposed to be comic relief, delivering malapropisms like “That’s the way the cookie bounces.” I gave him an unwed mother from a local family of n’er-do-wells and a history of being pigeonholed as a kid who’d never make anything of himself. I planned to turn that assumption on its head, but I had no idea until I was actually writing a scene late in the book that he was about to reveal one heck of a secret. The identity of Boxer’s father came as a huge surprise to both Liss and me.

In my WIP, I’ve not only assigned secrets to most of the suspects, but also to my amateur sleuth, Mikki Lincoln. She hasn’t told her late husband’s family (they’re in Maine; she’s now living in New York State) anything about the two previous murder cases she’s been involved in. She didn’t want them to worry. Naturally, this information comes out at the worst possible moment and when her visiting nephew hears the horrifying details, he goes into protective mode. Mikki then has to keep even more secrets from him in order to solve the most recent murder.

There was also a second “rule” I followed when I was writing for middle-grades readers. It was “kill off the parents.” Not always literally, of course, in those innocent days of the 1980s, but think about it: if you want children or teens to solve a crime, they need to be able to do their sleuthing without the adults in their lives hovering over them. In writing cozy mysteries for an adult audience this rule translates into “figure out a way for the amateur sleuth to operate unimpeded by police professionals”. . . but that’s a topic for another blog.

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Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett is the author of nearly sixty traditionally published books written under several names. She won the Agatha Award and was an Anthony and Macavity finalist for best mystery nonfiction of 2008 for How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries and was an Agatha Award finalist in 2015 in the best mystery short story category. She was the Malice Domestic Guest of Honor in 2014. Currently she writes the contemporary Liss MacCrimmon Mysteries (Overkilt) and the “Deadly Edits” series (Crime & Punctuation) as Kaitlyn and the historical Mistress Jaffrey Mysteries (Murder in a Cornish Alehouse) as Kathy. The latter series is a spin-off from her earlier “Face Down” mysteries and is set in Elizabethan England. Her most recent collection of short stories is Different Times, Different Crimes. Her websites are www.KaitlynDunnett.com and www.KathyLynnEmerson.com and she maintains a website about women who lived in England between 1485 and 1603 at www.TudorWomen.com

Make them talk

William Andrews: I find cute-grandchildren stories as boring as the next person, so a warning: this posting starts with my granddaughter. She’s 3, and obviously she’s cute. She’s discovered how much I enjoy making her animals (when did they become “stuffies?”) talk. She enjoys their tales as well and often presents one or more of them to me with the command: “Make them talk.” And so they do, telling stories of their adventures, asking her questions, speculating about what her parents are up to, and so forth. I don’t know how long this period of magic will last, but I love every minute of it. And it naturally got me thinking about what writers do all the time.

We make our characters talk. Of course we also make them do things, and we create a background upon which they both talk and act and a theme that underlies the whole. But fundamentally, at least for me, writing is about making them talk.

I can’t prove it, but based on my own experience and on conversations with other writers, the most common question we get asked at signings and readings is a variant on “Where did the story come from?” Every writer is different, some starting with the story, others with the characters, still others with a theme. But I think the most honest answer, at least for me, to the question of how the story started is that writers hear voices, or at a minimum that once the story is underway it’s the voices we hear that sustain it. My first mystery, Stealing History, began when I read a newspaper account of items stolen from New England historical societies. The plot came quickly into my head, but almost simultaneously I imagined the central character, Julie Williamson, and before I knew it I heard her voice, and the voices of her secretary, her trustees, visitors to the historical society where she works.

The voices are no doubt composites of voices I’ve heard—and in some cases still hear regularly. For example, Julie’s secretary, Mrs. Detweiller, is not at all like the several secretaries I had the pleasure of working with in my other career, but her voice combines qualities of a number of people I’ve known: accusatory, distracted, somewhat pompous, often talking more to herself than responding to others. Her voice defines Mrs. Detweiller and reflects the troubled relationship Julie has with her because of Julie’s being “from away.”

The voices I hear as I write raise an interesting question: are they talking, or am I making them talk? If you hear voices in your head you may be a candidate for therapy. Or you may be a writer. Or maybe both. Let’s assume you’re a writer and reasonably sane. As you make your characters talk you give them the power to move your story along, to act in ways that create tension and present conflicts to drive the narrative. And you let them develop their personalities, their habits, quirks, likes and dislikes. Who knew my Julie Williamson doesn’t like to cook but is fortunate to have a boyfriend who does? I didn’t know that when I first met her, but over time as she talked that part of her personality and her relationship with her partner helped define her for me. The way she talks about food—she loves it, and all the more when her friend cooks it—reflects her personality and helps explain her actions.

But back to my cute granddaughter. Two of her animals, twin badgers named Badger 1 and Badger 2, are frequent story tellers. [image error]I’m asked to make them talk, I’m sure my granddaughter knows, at some level, that I’m the one doing the talking. But note that she says make them talk. In other words, let the badgers have their say. When we write fiction, we always aim to let the characters use their own voices, while we also know we are making them talk. Are we talking or listening? That’s a mystery for mystery writers to ponder.

Snippet

Dorothy Cannell: I was sitting at an airport waiting for my connecting flight when I [image error]heard the person in the seat beside me talking directly into my ear.  That’s how it sounded, although when I looked up I saw it was woman on her cell phone.  What she had said caught my attention.

“A five year old deciding whether he’d go to school or not.  A child of his age,” heroutraged voice shot up with each syllable, “staging that kind of rebellion and being allowed to get away with it!  A period of isolation was clearly in order!” A pause as whoever she was talking to replied.  Then a self-congratulatory grunt. “No, after that little trauma things went reasonably well.”

Had the book I was reading been David Copperfield or Oliver Twist I’d have wondered if I dozed momentarily and found myself in the world where mistreatment of children was rejoiced in as a righteous prerogative.  A period of isolation.  That sounded more like days locked into a room on bread and water rather than fifteen minutes in time out.

[image error]Who was this woman?  One of those TV reality series super nannies brought in to restore calm to the family home where the offspring swung from the light fixtures, flung themselves on the floor and beat their feet like drums, or drove the car out of the garage to make clear they really were running away from home?  I took a look at her harsh profile and decided she would never have acquired her Mary Poppins certificate.  A truant officer, fifty years overdue for retirement?  I settled on that – even a pack of Dobermans and a Condemned Notice attached to the house could not keep her out. The sort where discussions occur beforehand such as:

“I know she’s your mother, and you’re not to blame for that, but can’t you have a heart attack and die five minutes after she marches in?  Surely she’d take that as a hint this is not a good time.  Oh, hell!  That won’t work.  She’d stay to arrange the funeral and then never leave.

“Don’t ask me to be nice to your sister.  She’d decide I was currying favor out of a massive inferiority complex and bring in a psychiatrist, who’d go along with the insistence that I’m a danger to myself and others.

“Why don’t we pack up what we need, including the kids, in a couple of suitcase and run away to some deserted Pacific Island?  I know, dear, I hate endless sunshine, blue seas and sand, but anything is better than having her rant on about my not eating the raisins in my bran flakes and how if I were her husband I wouldn’t be allowed to go to work until I did.”

She reached down for her carry-on and marched purposefully out of eyesight when a boarding call was announced.  I was left wondering about a five-year-old boy who didn’t always want to go to school and as a result brought down the ire of that awful woman.  That’s how I thought of her, although if taken as a whole – instead of a snippet of overheard conversation – she could be a pleasant person who happened to be travel-fatigued and overstating what was on her mind.  But I would never know her or that little boy.  All I was borrowing from reality was a couple of lines of dialog, which is why I could let my imagination roam uncluttered.

What was her relationship to the child?

How would the memory of that incident impact him as an adult?

How far might he go in taking revenge?

I have already written a scene in which a man tells the police this story in hope they will view her as a suspect in the crime being investigated.

Happy reading,

Dorothy