Barbara Gregorich's Blog, page 18

Guide to Writing the Mystery Novel: Part II

Guide to Writing the Mystery Novel was somewhat easy to write, probably because I had been thinking about it for three years. Some chapters took me a day to write, some two or three days. I went at it steadily, so that I would never lose touch with the purpose of the book and the tone of the book.

After I finished, I let a couple of weeks go by, and then I sat down with the manuscript and read it critically, marking it up heavily. From these marked-up pages I wrote the second draft. I showed...

Guide to Writing the Mystery Novel: Part I

Perhaps a third of the way through writing the first draft of Sound Proof, my second mystery novel, I realized that I wanted to write a how-to book on writing the mystery novel. Two factors contributed to my wanting to write such a guide. 

The first was that I had been reading a lot of mystery novels which, in one way or another, annoyed me.  One might have had a far too obvious villain: somebody I recognized as the murderer by the third chapter. Another might have had a far, far too obscure...

Mountain Passes: Panther Pass

Contrary to common perception, Europeans didn’t first occupy the land that became the United States in an east-to-west direction. The Spanish marched from south to north, establishing the town of Santa Fe in 1610, ten years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.

French missionaries and explorers, on the other hand, moved through the new land from north to south, using the waterways of the Great Lakes and Mississippi River to establish contact with native tribes of what are today Michiga...

The Power of Story: Phil Passen’s Musical Programs

As you may recall from a previous blog, The Endless Highway, I am a roadie for my husband, Phil Passen, who is a hammered dulcimer player. As roadie, I get to sit in on his performances. This has led me to not only observe that Phil’s performances are loved by the audiences he plays for (public libraries, historical societies, high schools), but also to analyze why they are so popular.

Here are a few of Phil’s musical programs:

Music of the Civil War
Music to Commemorate the Sinking of the Ti...

From Here to There: Transitional Devices

Because I’ve been doing a lot of teaching lately, I’ve come to notice that most beginning writers have great difficulty with transitional words and phrases. That is, they don’t use transitional words and phrases. 

I suspect that one of the reasons so many beginning writers fail to think of and use transitional devices between sentences and paragraphs is that they are wrapped up in the story they’re writing, and the story is very clear to them. They fail to take the reader’s needs into conside...

Mountain Passes: The Cumberland Gap

When I was in third grade, my mother gave me a book whose stories told about mountain passes in history. As a result I became fascinated by mountain passes. Once I started to drive and travel across the US, I encountered mountain passes in person and became even more interested in their location and  importance.

Years ago I wrote the manuscript of a nonfiction picture book on twelve important mountain passes in US history. For each mountain pass I wrote a poem, boxed statistics, and prose. Th...

The Floor Is Not a Laundry Basket

I thoroughly enjoy the Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series featuring Precious Ramotswe. In one of the more recent titles, Precious and Grace accepted as fact that men throw their laundry on the floor. The two detectives considered this clothing-as-debris behavior as unchangeable. This made me wonder how things might have been different had Precious and Grace reacted differently when, at the beginning of their marriages, they encountered the clothes on the floor.

That...

The Endless Highway: My Life as a Roadie

Perhaps we all have an avocation as well as a vocation. My father, for example, was a steelworker but also a carpenter. My mother was a bartender, then a homemaker, but always a crocheter. I’m a writer. But I’m also a roadie, and have been for more than twenty years. That’s because my husband, Phil Passen, is a musician. In order to be with him and help him out, I am his roadie.

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Roadie

I drive our car to Phil’s gigs. I help load the car as much as he’ll allow: he tends to think that only he k...

Punctuation Marks – 3

The first thing that impressed me about the Harry Potter novels was the story; the second thing that impressed me was J.K. Rowling’s use of semicolons. I was happy to see her punctuate closely related independent clauses with a semicolon. 

And I have found, when reading some mystery fiction, more semicolons than one would normally encounter in a novel. The first question I ask myself is: Was the author an attorney? Quite often the answer is Yes. Perhaps the legal mind is attracted to the fine...

Punctuation Marks – 2

[image error]Just as many people are afraid of the comma (in that they don’t know how it works or when to use it), so, too, they’re afraid of the apostrophe. Probably more than they’re afraid of the comma!

The apostrophe was used in French before it was used in English, and in French it was used to indicate an elision — one or more letters missing from a word. As in Let’s go to a movie, there’s a good one playing just down the street, and it’s been ages since we’ve eaten popcorn. During the 1500s learned...