Welcome Yourself Back Into Your Writing

Sandra Neily here:

Cobwebs may happen after a break from the page.

  The challenge! After a long break, how to reenter a manuscript? (Or a report or anything that’s been sitting for a while.)

How to re-engage with the original urge to tell a particular story?

I use several devices to bring myself “home” to a manuscript. I read it out loud. Sometimes I have my computer’s read function read it to me. I call a friend and read over a passage and ask for feedback and then there’s my Essential Note Library.

When I have been away from writing for a while, I visit notes I left that are designed to bring me home to the writing. (I rework and update my library often and keep it on the first page of whatever I’m creating. If I have to leave the project for a while, I take some time to first leave a trail of engaging notes and questions to welcome me back.)

Agatha Christie looking wisely at us.

Some library notes, like this Agatha Christie quote, offer me and my ageing narrator wisdom. “As life goes on it becomes tiring to keep up the character you invented for yourself, and so you relapse into individuality and become more like yourself every day.”

me: Hahaha…for sure! It really is about character, character, character.

Some notes remind me of helpful research that’s waiting to be rediscovered.

Some are quotations I might want for an epigraph before the story starts. Epigraphs telescope the writing down to a powerful essence.

Some notes are plot and character reminders or notes to emphasize central themes.

Some are bits of my previous mysteries or writings that I slide in to echo backstory or character and retain the series voice. (And also my current murder victim leaves a journal with pithy quotes from his previous adventures with my narrator.)

My Essential Note Library pulls me into the writing, but it also illuminates creative directions and tasks I want to tackle.

I’ve fixed up some notes to share with you here. But first, here’s my most recent ‘didn’t write’ excuse.

It seems my granddaughters decided that “fiction” was what they would write when they spent vacation days with me. My office usually looks solitary but this week it was filled with budding authors. Isn’t that grand!

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Stuff from my Essential Note Library

Research:

Subnivean zone: small rodents like voles tunnel through and underneath the snow to avoid predators. Doesn’t stop ermines! They are slender enough to hunt in their prey’s tunnels. The unique habitat between the ground and the base of the snow is referred to as the subnivean zone …

Rivers Reborn: Alewives Fish Make a Recovery in Maine (nature.org)   replacing culverts on roads that have small culverts preventing fish passage: upstream pools can grow warm and discourage fish.

Grief of lost places; mourning.  Iceland holds funeral for the loss of its first glacier.

Home – Good Grief Network  climate grief aid site

Game warden saves loon trapped on snow.

Discover status of ME Land Back movement. Nationally, indigenous people control 80% of conserved land. How the Winnemem Winto won their ancestral land back and help save Chinook Salmon – Vox

Possible Epigraphs:

“…  If wilderness is outlawed, only outlaws can save wilderness.  … God bless America. Let’s save some of it.” Edward Abbey

“Grief dares us to love once more.” Terry Tempest Williams, “Refuge”

Plot & Character Reminders:

Wildlife Trafficking: Suggest the crime even earlier. Stockdale says to Patton: “Turns out when big numbers of animals are illegally trafficked out of the country, the feds wonder if unusual pockets of species decline might signal bad actors at work. You’re good at noticing what’s not right in the woods, so I might also hire you for that.”

Newcomer/Outsider Ignorance: People who buy into the woods who’ve never lived up there don’t know what’s already been lost; like people without cancer cannot know what losses have arrived, even after treatment.

Cancer & House Lots: Both ASSAULT something essentially whole. The forest. The body.

Can Pock (dog) sniff out salamanders after his previous work to find dead birds and bats? He likes “moving things.”

Character arc: Patton: 1, steps outside law. 2, Accepts the misfit grapevine, outlaw employment gig. 3. Accepts LOSS (cancer, wild world). But what about her grief?

Don’t forget: return of hair spray; Patton & chocolate; get inside animals’ thoughts (chained beaver in #1); THE POWER OF MENACE. Cassandra myth reappears (no one listens). Vernal pool locations have GPS coordinates hacked.

Repeat what the narrator thinks/said previously in series?

What else could bring two people together who were so very different? An ache in the back of my throat answered before the words lined up in a clear sentence.  We both believed the wild world would heal us if we needed healing.

I like to find the vulnerability in people and go after them before they have time to regroup.

I took strange comfort in knowing and seeing what others did not or refused to see.

“… wild animal health depends on our setting up the outdoors as a zoo—a zoo without bars. I know it’s a contradiction, but today no animal can be free until we accept responsibility for its freedom … Human hands are all over wild, but then we have to step back and let wild ones be what they are”

… moving through woods is a healing activity …

Dear Readers, what strategies do you use? (Well, putting one’s butt in chair seems to be pretty universal …)

Sandy’s debut novel, “Deadly Trespass, A Mystery in Maine” won a national Mystery Writers of America award, was a finalist in the Women’s Fiction Writers Association “Rising Star” contest, and was a finalist for a Maine Literary Award. The second Mystery in Maine, “Deadly Turn,” was published in 2021. Her third “Deadly” is due out in 2025. Find her novels at all Shermans Books (Maine) and on Amazon. Find more info on Sandy’s website.