Terry Shames's Blog: 7 Criminal Minds, page 227

Making it Real

When I think back on some of the plots of books I’ve really liked, some of them seem utterly preposterous. And yet at the time, I was totally engaged and went along for the whole ride. How does that happen? It’s all about engagement with the characters.
I have read some pretty good books with characters I wouldn’t want to know. Also, if a plot is intriguing enough and the setting well established, you can limp along with so-so characters. If the plot is teaching you something, that can also make up for dull characters.
But the best of all reading worlds is when the characters seemed like real people.
How does an author do that?
I recently had an experience that reminded how it works. I’m working on a thriller. In the first draft, I skimmed over my protagonist, knowing I would go back and “fill in the blanks.” He’s a guy. A guy with a special ops background of some kind. A guy with a girlfriend, and a son, and some kind of bank job. Blah, blah. I figured I would get to know him as I wrote, and that in the next drafts I would build on what I learned about him. I know a lot of western men, and I figured I’d be fine.
In the book there are also Middle Eastern men, Arab Afghanis. I know no one who fits that general description, so I worked hard to find out what these men would look like; the kind of clothes they would wear; the things they could be proud of, angry about, afraid of; their attitudes toward strangers, towards their family members, both men and women; toward their peers and their servants. I tried to find out what their homes would look like inside and out—what kinds of rooms they would have, their furniture. What would they spend money on? I worked hard to picture them not as “they” but as familiar individuals. I struggled to give them believable quirks, likes, and dislikes.
I gave the first 100 pages to my writers group to find out what was working and what wasn’t. Although I shouldn’t have been, I was surprised when they all said the Afghani characters were more interesting and more believable than the western characters.
What that means is that the better characters are those that an author has worked hard to get to know as individuals. It’s not enough to know that my protagonist is “a guy” who has elevated training of some kind that gives him the ability to overcome the obstacles in the plot—it’s more interesting to know why he sought that special training, what he has done with it, and where’s he’s going. Not A guy, but THE guy. He’s someone specific, with traits that come out of his experiences; that makes him behave certain ways in certain circumstances based on his pasts, his fears, his dreams. That’s when the character becomes real.

Pluggung Away

Many of you may know that I had a difficult last half of summer. On July 13, I had shoulder surgery and became one of the two percent who suffered nerve damage in my arm as a result. No! This is not a whine about poor me. It’s about moving right along.
For the first few weeks I was in pain and grumpy as hell—feeling sorry for myself, imagining scenarios in which I would never again be able to use my right hand, thinking of ways to get revenge on my doctor, etc. I worried that I’d get carpal tunnel problems in my poor overworked left hand, blah, blah, blah.
But I’m a writer and the first thing I wanted to do was write. I had set myself the goal of getting back to work, even in a limited capacity two weeks after the surgery. I don’t remember exactly how long it was after the surgery that I actually faced my computer one-handed, but I did. I’m no martyr—I didn’t  set impossible goals or make a fuss internally if I didn’t reach a goal, but I  tried to do a bit each day. One day I was grumping that I hadn’t done anything productive in forever, and suddenly I thought, “Wait a minute, you goose, you’ve gotten a lot done.” Then I tallied up what I had actually accomplished in the last few weeks, and realized I was plugging along and accomplishing little bits of this and that—writing a weekly blog, doing edits on the thriller I finished the first draft of just before the surgery, and yep, writing my weekly blog. It all added up to a respectable amount of work.
Also I have been going over the edits suggested by my copyeditor at Seventh Street Books for the book that comes out January12, The Necessary Murder of Nonie Blake.Yes. January 12, which means…YIKES! It’s time to get my promotion calendar going. Time to do all those tedious, necessary tasks that must be done if I have a chance of getting the books into the hands of readers. I realized a while back that promotion is not about me, me, me. It’s about wanting people to have the chance to read a book I worked hard on and that I’m proud of. If they don’t know about the book, they won’t get a chance to read it. Thus, promotion.


I’m lucky. I like talking to people, reading aloud, traveling to bookstores and libraries and book clubs. But those gigs don’t set themselves up, It would be nice to be one of those authors in the rarefied world of big publishing who get their tours set up and paid for by their publishers, but alas that isn’t me. It falls to me to set up the opportunities to talk to people about my books, to write to the bookstores and arrange the travel, notify magazines that have interviewed me in the past, try to get radio interviews, etc. These days the trend is to have more than one author at bookstores, so it also means finding out who has books coming out that would likely be interested in sharing author time with me.

So time to plug away a little harder. And by the way, I’ve typed this into the computer using both hands. Turns out that there are hand clinics that make these amazing contraptions that allow people with limited hand usage to do all kinds of tasks. I’m ready to get to work!

Organizing emails

Update: Last week I casually asked whether people kept a messy desk or a tidy desk. Whoa! Who knew people would be so passionate about the state of their desk?  They are, and messy won by a huge majority. But what really interested me was that many people don’t use a desk at all. And some have multiple desks—including one woman who keeps a messy one and a tidy one. And by the way, after I posted the blog, I cleaned up my desk. Alas, it’s already on its way to messy again.
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In keeping with the theme of messy/tidy, I have a question for everyone: How do you keep your important emails sorted? I lose a lot of time every month trying to locate emails that I either received or sent with valuable information. During the search, I’m cursing people (including me) who tack an important piece of information onto the end of an email about nothing in particular.
Example, Subject line: My sister is getting married! The email contains all the juicy details and at the very end, the writer says, P.S. Joe Jones at the Mystery is Grand bookstore wants us to do a reading in August of 2016. Interested? The next couple of emails discuss the how, when and what about the event—but we never change the subject line. Five months later, I realize that the event is looming and I can’t find the emails. Sometimes I can’t even remember who the other author was.
Sure, my intention is to put it on the calendar the very minute. But just as I open the calendar my husband needs something right now or the dog throws up, or I suddenly realize I’m late….and the calendar loses.
And what about the reservations I make for a hotel at a conference, and they send me a nice confirmation. Do they send it with the name of the hotel? Sometimes (bless you, Hyatt). But then you get those hotels that are oh-so-coy. Their email address is something like Reservations@weareidiots.com, and the subject line is  “Staying 2 nights.” Thanks. That makes it 100% impossible to find your stupid confirmation. UNLESS I have been clever enough to flag it.


Which brings me to the email flagging system. It works pretty well as long as I:
1) Actually use it every time2) Weed out old ones that are no longer needed3) Use the right color of flag for the particular email.
What I end up doing is printing out a hard copy of important emails, which works pretty well as long as I do one of the following:

   1) Print it out2  2) Make a hand-written note of what it actually pertains to (see cryptic email names and subject lines above)    3) Don’t lose it    4) Don’t misfile it.
I think I might start forwarding the information to myself with revised subject lines, which should work fine as long as I do it.
Any suggestions?

Tidy or Messy?

Someone once told me they had read a study that said people are more creative if their surroundings are neat and tidy. I think I might have to test that out in another lifetime.
I like to keep my house in good order. I’m not obsessively tidy, mind you, but I do like to clean up when things start to get out of hand. I like to have enough order so that I can find things when I need them. It makes me anxious if my house gets too messy. So how come that doesn’t hold true in my workspace? It’s a disaster area. Occasionally I can’t stand he disorder anymore, so I go into a frenzy and clean up my space. Good, right? Not really. Ten minutes after I sit down to work, it’s messy again. It’s like magic. I get out an article I need to read for my WIP, and when I’m done, it falls where it may. I print out something and fling it wherever it lands. I get a phone call or an email and make notes and then lay the note down “wherever.”
Right now on my desk I have two partially drunk bottles of water that have been there for weeks. I have old notes to myself, a copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology that I took out a few weeks ago to look up something and never put back. Half-read books, bookmarks, a half-finished crossword puzzle, pencils with no lead, receipts from my last conference that I have yet to file…


What’s going on? My best self believes that a messy desk is a sign of a messy brain. But tell that to the imp who doesn’t put things back. I’ve come to the conclusion that as tidy as the rest of my house is, my study is never going to measure up.
Since this has been going on for a long time, I have a suspicion that there must be a reason for it. I’d like to think that the messy desk signals that my mind is creating order out of the chaos of ideas that tumble around in my head. But maybe I’m just lazy.
I’m curious to know how others handle this. In many polls, you’ll find that half of respondents do things one way, half do it another way—and sometimes they are passionate about their of doing things. Best example I know is the divide between plotters and pantsers.

So I’m taking an informal poll here. Is your desk tidy or messy? And why?

Editing for "fun"

I don’t know about everyone else, but I’d rather edit anyone else’s work than my own. When I read another person’s WIP, I am clever, astute, and forthright. I can give terrific advice, and know that I’m helping someone write a best seller.
When I tackle my own, on the other hand, I’m something of a dullard. But that is only true when I actually sit down in front of the draft to start editing. Before that, in my head I’m turning turgid, bloated sentences into elegant, dare I say “poetic” prose. My characters, who for the past 90,000 words have hidden behind corners refusing to join me, leap off the page with just a few brilliant key strokes. Plot lines that are as tangled as a Gordion knot suddenly reveal themselves to be masters of ingenuity.
Humph. Daydream all you want, honey, the first go-round of edits will barely get you headed in the right direction. Your characters will begin to wake up and stretch, laughing at your attempts to goose them into action. You will read your plot in the next two books you pick up, not to mention that it will happen in real life and your plot will be revealed in a series of newspaper articles. That poetic prose? Pedestrian at best.
You will wonder why you thought you could write scenes set in a city you not only don’t know well, but have never visited—in fact that you never even wanted to visit. You’ll wonder why you didn’t set your book in Paris or Florence, or even New York City—places you actually love. Why Kabul? Or Minsk? Or Ames, Iowa?
Why did you think you knew anything about hacking computer code? Or about the intricacies of banking—or that you could make either of those things interesting? How did you think you could get into the mind of a 30-year-old woman when you left your thirties in the dust a long, long time ago? In your you write successfully about a geezer, so how does that give you confidence that you can get inside the head of a forty-year old man?
In the first go at a draft, I have to keep reminding myself that it’s not a work all done; it’s a work in progress. I might have to dig a little deeper to understand how a thirty-something woman thinks these days. I have to read articles and books about what it’s like living in Kabul. I have to make sure the names I’ve chosen for my Middle Eastern characters are actually workable and that I’m not naming an Afghani man a name that only an Iranian man would have. I have to check a slew of facts—and then recheck them. And that’s apart from getting to know my characters deeply, and making sure the plot doesn’t have gaping holes.
Bottom line: That’s what editing is—not the fun part you get to do when you read someone else’s WIP, where you point out a little discrepancy and then go on your merry way, but the hard grind of smoothing, rechecking, discovering, and making it work.

My Next Book

I’m thinking about my next Samuel Craddock book. It’s going to be dynamite. Brilliant, actually. Every word of it will be breathtakingly beautiful. A literary tour de force—but also an intriguing, genre-bending, complex mystery. And the characters—don’t even get me started on the depth and breadth of the characters. They’ll leap off the page. Everyone will think they actually know the characters. I’ll get so many emails and letters that I’ll have to hire a secretary to keep up with answering them.
I won’t have enough shelf space for all the awards this book will win. It will fly off the shelves. An overnight sensation. TV and radio interviews. Speaking engagements, audio contracts, movie deals, foreign sales will fall into my lap. Other writers will read the book and say, “Well, I may as well close up my computer and take a course in how to be an electrician. No way I can compete with her wonderful book.” It’ll sell at least a million copies. I can already start spending the money. It’s a sure thing.


Ha! Ever had these thoughts before? Yeah, neither have I. May I suggest that a little pill called Percoset might have something to do with this fantasy? Yep, that’s where the high-flown thought came from.
Maybe we writers could use more of this kind of feverish self-confidence when we sit down in front of the blank page. Instead, I get this:  I? Write a book? Are you kidding? The others were flukes—this time I’ll crash and burn! My characters will be wooden, the prose forgettable, the descriptions trite, the plot indecipherable. Blah, blah, blah.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have that bit of fantasy to spur us on? Not at the cost of taking a drug, it isn’t. At least not to me. I’ve been taking it for pain, and I can’t wait to stop. Give me plain old reality over this drug-induced grandiosity. Maybe I’m too invested in the Puritan work ethic: the goal isn’t worth achieving if it doesn’t involve some struggle. But somehow I feel that if I don’t have to put in some hard hours, the book will be forgettable at best, atrocious at worst.
Sure, I have some moments when I feel exhilarated, when I’m thinking, “I think that paragraph worked,” or, “Hmmm, that character is finally coming to me.” It’s a reward I get for rewriting the paragraph ten times, or for obsessing about a character’ background and motivations. In cold, hard reality, that will have to do.
So I’m the fantasy aside and getting back to work. Oh, yes, but first I have to write a list of actors I think would play Samuel Craddock in the movie.

E.L. Doctorow and Me

First an apology. I didn't post on my blog last week. The complications from shoulder surgery ended up creating a lot of pain and there were any things fell off the wagon. It wasn't that I didn't get around to writing a post--it was that I didn't think of it at all until Friday. So forgive me, please.

I hope you enjoy reading about what Ed Doctorow taught me.

When I had newly decided to become a writer, I signed up for a writing conference at which a member of the faculty was E.L. Doctorow. He was a congenial man with a ready laugh, a sparkling wit, and best of all for fledgling writers a passionate interest in teaching the craft of writing.
At any conference you find those in the faculty who for whatever reason don’t make themselves available except in staged opportunities—giving a talk followed by a question and answer session. These can be well-done talks that make a true attempt to provide useful information to greenhorns, or they can be light, entertaining “feel good” talks. And then there is that rare breed of natural-born teachers who mingle and make themselves available for one-on-one questions. I recently attended Thrillerfest and found David Morrell a wonderful example of this later type. Nab him in passing for a question, and he’ll answer in full.
Doctorow was like that and during the course of the workshop he provided one of the most valuable lessons I ever got at a writing workshop. Each evening one of the faculty would give an hour lecture on the subject of his or her choice. When Doctorow’s time came, he said he was going to give us a gift—he was going to read at length from the first draft of his work in progress. For the next hour we were dazzled by sparkling passages of prose. It was intimidating hearing what this man thought of as “first draft.” To me it sounded polished and ready for publication.
Later, at the bar, he asked me what I thought of the reading. I told him that I was intimidated and thought he had been showing off. He was taken aback and insisted that wasn’t his intention at all. He wanted to illustrate the random nature of what comes out in first draft—the little riffs you go on that really have nothing to do with the story, the playing with words and ideas, the exploring of a character or situation to see where it will lead.
Only when the book, Loon Lake, came out did I understand fully what he meant. What survived from all those golden words he read that night were a few sentences—because those were the ones that actually meant something in the book.
I’ve just written a 100,000 word first draft, and my writer’s group is wondering when they’ll get to see it. I told them it would be quite a while. The draft is full of those rambling asides that in the end will not make the cut, so why subject them to reading that? There may be perfectly good passages of prose in the draft that won’t make the cut because they have nothing to do with the book itself. It would be a waste of time and energy for readers to wade through things that I know won’t make the cut.
Learning to recognize what belongs—what is important to the book you want to write—is one of the hardest editing lessons a writer has to learn.  Doctorow gave us a gift when he put his raw words out on the page. Whether we accepted the gift was up to us.

What to Do? Thin

I find myself in an unprecedented situation, for me anyway: I cannot type with my right hand. Shoulder surgery last week has left me with the unusual complication of nerve irritation (that’s what I’m calling it, since the surgeon doesn’t know just what is.) For someone like me, who types many words every day, it’s frustrating and daunting. And downright scary—although I try not to go there. I’m choosing to think full function will return, and hoping for sooner rather than later.
People’s first reaction on hearing my dilemma is a breezy, “Oh, you’ll have to get some voice recognition software.” Easy for them to say. And I’ll definitely go that route if the situation continues. But I find the prospect disheartening. What this situation has made clear to me is that I think through my fingers, specifically through typing. I type fast, pounding out words as if they were eating up the pages. It’s hard for me to imagine switching to thinking aloud. (It might be a good idea for me to learn to think while I’m speaking, too—but that’s a subject for another day.)

Photo: Puttug my right hand to better use.

The question for now is, what to do while I perform the suggested “wait and see” function. Just before the surgery, I completed a first draft that came in at just over 100,000 words. To say I’m dissatisfied with it is a vast understatement. There’s an occasional scene that works pretty well and it’s an interesting, workable premise, but that’s about it. Characters, setting, action, plot, and motivation all need a lot of work. My usual mode of dealing with this would be to charge at the manuscript full bore, slashing hunks of prose and typing out replacement chunks to see how they work.
 Instead, I’m thinking. Instead of writing a lot of words trying to capture what I’m missing in a character, I’m picturing him going about his daily life, pondering what he thinks about when he first gets up in the morning, or when he’s overtired or stressed. Thinking about how he works and what he does for recreation. I’m musing about his regrets, his triumphs small and large, what’s really important to him, and how those things came to be.
 Over the years I have cut out articles on writing craft, flagged blog posts, and underlined passages in craft books. Somehow I seldom get around to reading them. I plan to take advantage of my enforced idleness to tackle some of these articles. Who knows, eventually I may come to see this time as a gift.
  And now I’ve written an entire post with my left hand—a hand I admire tremendously for stepping up its game!

The Pigeon Theory

Have you looked closely at a pigeon recently? They are really pretty birds, with lovely markings, pink feet and interesting eyes. I can hear you now, “Are you nuts? Pigeons are a dime a dozen.” On the other hand, if you see a mountain bluebird in your area, you’re likely to explain, “What a beautiful bird!” Rare. In fact, bird watchers won’t cross the street to see a pigeon, but some travel long distances to see rare birds.
Now imagine that these birds are books and the birdwatchers are readers. The question a writer hoping to be published needs to ask herself is, “Am I writing a pigeon or a bluebird?” In other words are you writing a book very much like dozens of books out there, or are you writing one that will stand out?


I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating. After a long hiatus from trying to get published while my son was young, I decided when he was a senior in high school that it was time for me to get to work again. I promptly wrote a brand new book with a female detective protagonist working for an agency in San Francisco? Sound familiar? Yes, I wrote a pigeon. And sure enough, even though every agent I queried told me it was well-written and many of them said they were eager to read whatever else I wrote, all of them indicated in one way or another, “Ho hum, another pigeon.”
Then I took a weekend writing workshop organized by Sophie Littlefield and Cornelia Read. It was a great workshop, but the pivotal moment for me was when Sophia gave an impassioned speech to those of us struggling to find our writing niche. She urged each writer to reach deep inside and find something he or she was passionate about—something that only “you” could write. She said that’s what you had to do if you were serious about being a success as a writer.
I had heard the first part of that advice before, but this time I heard the second part as well—that this is what you had to do if you were serious. I was working on something else, but that advice kept nagging at me. So about two months later, I sat down to think—really think: what did I have a connection to in my life that no one else had, and that I hadn’t read anything like it. My grandfather and the town he lived in sprang to mind. I had written some short stories set in Jarrett Creek, Texas—even a couple of short stories featuring my grandfather.
The rest is history. The first book, A Killing at Cotton Hill took me only a couple of months to write—it was a book that had been inside me all along—I needed to recognize it. I didn’t know any other characters like Samuel Craddock, and at that time hardly knew any other mystery series set in Texas (one huge exception was Bill Crider).
So I urge you, if you are having trouble reaching an audience, ask yourself if you’re writing a pigeon or an exotic bird that people will flock (groan—pun intended) to see?

Writing the Other

Last weekend I was on a panel at an afternoon of all things mystery at Kepler’s Bookstore in Palo Alto. My panel was entitled “It Ain’t Me Babe,” about writing a character who is not you. I write a series about a 60-something man in a small Texas town, an ex-chief of police who takes up the job again. He married a wealthy woman who collected art and grew to love modern art. Under the influence of his next-door neighbor he comes to enjoy a good glass of red wine. He also raises cattle.
It ain’t me, babe! I do like modern art and red wine and I spent wonderful hours in a small town in Texas where my grandparents lived when I was young—but that’s it. I’m noticeably not a man, not a cattle rancher and certainly not a chief of police, ex or otherwise. Sot the panel was just right for me.
But the first question threw me. The moderator talked about a woman who became head of the NAACP for a number of years, pretending to be an African American and asked if we writers were in the position of pretending as this woman was. I’ve been thinking about the question since then. At the heart of the question is the assumption that in order to write someone who is not like you, as a writer you have to pretend to be that person.
I don’t think that’s the case. You don’t “pretend” to become that person. In some ways, mentally, you actually become that person. When I am writing about Samuel, I feel as if I’m a camera, walking through his life, seeing through his eyes, recording events, reacting to them, having opinions about them. In some ways I think that’s what drives us to be writers, the fact that we have other voices in our heads that we channel. Not to be all woo-woo about it, it’s a bit of magic.
Is this what we mean when we talk about being “authentic” as a writer? Sometimes I have trouble getting into a character’s head and the character falls flat. It feels like an inauthentic rendering of his or her part in the novel. In order to come closer to the truth, I find that I have to slip into the skin of the character and mentally move through that world. I don’t know if that’s what other writers do. It’s something I’ve never heard anyone talk about. I’ve heard of writers producing biographies of their characters, but not mentally becoming the character.
I was recently asked if I thought I could write from the viewpoint of a 25-year-old man. Who knows? It feels like more of a stretch than writing an older man and I don't know if I have enough ability to "become" someone so young and with a different world and personal view. I'd like to find out
So I come back to the question. Is it “pretending” or “becoming” someone else? I’m curious to know what others think, and how other writers come to an understanding of the characters they are writing about.