The clear, waist-deep creek was full of salmon finning nose to tail as I eased up over a low rise. The sun was bright in a fresh new blue bowl overhead, and the mild July day it felt like fall.
We’d been told mosquitoes were the state bird of Alaska, so I smelled like a walking DEET factory. The scent of clothes and skin soaked in insect repellent me of camping when I was a kid. The Old Man was a firm believer in spraying us down until we virtually dripped.
We hadn’t seen a mosquito on the whole nine-day salmon trip, so the stuff must have worked great!
Unfamiliar birds flitted through the spruce trees that made me think of Christmas. Willows and alders lined Montana Creek, making casting difficult. There were other bushes I couldn’t identify, but I gave each of them unmentionable names when my leader tangled up so bad I had to break off the limber branches to free the fly.
That extra issue was irritating, because that day we were casting 9-weight rods with big fat salmon flies that apparently were a favorite treat for those bushes.
The fish ignored my offerings.
Frustrated, I dug in one of the many pockets on my fishing vest to find a box of flies I hadn’t yet tried. It was filled with pink, blue sparkles, yellow, black, and chartreuse morsels all crowded together in the foam holders.
It reminded me of five-year-old girls’ birthday party with dresses and favors.
Clipping off the unmolested fly, I chose a black streamer designed to resemble a leach. It’s kind of a Catch-22. The salmon aren’t hungry, but we throw flies that look tasty.
Strip line, cast, back cast, forward, one more back cast to stretch the line out and lay it in the water. The fly sinks, bumps along the gravel and sand bottom and slides down the back of a big King who is patiently waiting for the one immediately in front to get off her phone and go.
Five casts later, the fish still weren’t interested.
Clamping the rod under my arm, I slipped off the fly and rummaged through another pocket to locate a different box. The other pockets were so packed with equipment I looked as if I were wearing an inflated lifejacket.
Two young men appeared in shorts, ancient hiking boots, and nothing else. Mutt and Jeff looked to be about eighteen. I looked down at my chest waders and wading boots, fully conscious of my vented shirt, polarized glasses, and hat.
The kids had nothing else but lots of hair and salmon rods.
Both broke out in wide grins. The tallest I’d named Jeff chinned toward the creek. “You catching anything?”
“Can’t buy a bite. How about y’all?”
“Caught half a dozen. We threw them back.”
“Figures.” I sighed. “What are you throwing?”
The shorter one I’d named Mutt held out a 7-weight rod and unhooked his lure to show me. It looked like a piece of yarn from his grandmother’s knitting bag.
I adjusted my glasses. “What is that?”
A piece of yarn from my grandmother’s knitting bag.”
“What makes it appealing?”
Jeff shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m not a fish, but it works.”
Mutt nodded. “It’s how you twist it on your hook.”
“Give me a bare hook.” Jeff held out his hand.
“The only bare ones I have are trout hooks.”
Mutt looked puzzled. “What do you catch trout for?”
I’d heard most Alaskans considered trout a trash fish. “I like to eat them.”
“Are you as good on trout as you are salmon?”
“Funny.”
Mutt took the streamer on the end of my leader and studied it for a moment before taking out his knife and stripping everything off except for the head. Then he plucked a wad of blue yarn from his wet pocket, untangled a piece, and somehow wove it onto the hook.
He held it out. “There. Did you see how I did that?”
I thought about the diopters in my fly vest, and how I wished I’d attached them to my trifocals to better see what he was doing. “Sure.”
He handed me two more pieces. “Keep these. I have plenty.”
Jeff pointed. “Mind if we play through?”
I shrugged. “Have at it.”
He flipped out a little line, made a cast, and we watched it drift. The line tightened, his rod bowed, and he had a fish on.
I sighed. “All right. Good luck.”
Engrossed in the fight, neither looked up and I made my way upstream to spend the rest of the day without a strike, but the twist of yarn worked the next day telling me I was onto something.
Now, I know this isn’t an outdoor blog, but as I told my girls when they wanted to know if reality and family are included, “Read between the lines.”
Today’s little suggestion relates to the way we write. Some would-be authors complain about how their submissions keep coming back, and I wonder, are they doing the same thing repeatedly without success?
Is their query letter a little off?
Is their elevator pitch wrong?
Is their entire story written from the wrong viewpoint? First person present tense?
Einstein supposedly defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results. There’s no evidence he actually said it, however, the idea describes a lack of progress or a futile approach, which was the way I wrote thirty years ago without success.
Bestselling author Craig Johnson of the Longmire series and I were talking a few weeks ago in Amarillo and he mentioned the state of western writing. His series are contemporary westerns with a traditional feel. He suggested new authors abandon the idea of writing like Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour.
“That’s already been done, by Grey and L’Amour. And done very well. With that in mind, writers need to find a different approach.”
It reminded me of the first writing panel I ever attended. A gentleman behind a mounted video camera in the audience raised his hand during the Q&A portion of the presentation. “I’ve submitted a dozen books, over and over to different houses and agents, and not one has ever been accepted. What’s wrong with these people?”
An author leaned forward and spoke into the microphone. “Maybe you aren’t any good.”
It was a harsh thing to say, but maybe true. He’d been trying the same thing over and over again. It was time to adapt.
Which is what I had to do that morning on Montana Creek in Alaska. The next day I brought a 43-pound King salmon to hand, using that bit of twisted yarn. I’d changed my approach.
Think about it.
Oh yeah, Rev, so true.
For years, I wrote whodunit mysteries that won contests, attracted editors, but ultimately were rejected. The heroes checked all the characterization boxes—interesting, smart, well-developed, likable but flawed. But I kept the bad guy/gal so well hidden I had no idea what they were doing offscreen or why, At the big reveal they appeared like cardboard pop ups, flat and two-dimensional.
Then I tried writing in the villain’s POV. What were *their* needs, goals, desires, motivations? That was the missing link. Finally I had the epiphany that the villain’s wants drove the plot, not the hero’s.
Once I stopped worrying about keeping the villain a secret and instead focused on them as the prime mover of the action, the books took off.
I realized I was not a whodunit mystery writer but a whydunnit, howdunnit suspense thriller writer.
That different bit of yarn changed everything.
Early on, many writers have trouble finding the right viewpoint, or genre. I didn’t know I was writing a mystery until I was halfway through, and had to wonder if that was the direction I should go.
It was.
And with that experience in my back pocket after nine mystery novels, I moved on to thrillers, but there’s usually some mystery buried in there, too. Writers simply need to find their niche.
Spot on, Rev. If what you’re doing isn’t working, learn why and try something different. For me, that was attending my first writer’s conference 17 years ago today, which set me on the path of practicing writing craft, away from doing the same old thing over and over.
You’re right. In your case it was a conference, in others, it might be meeting an established author, reading their work, and then listening to what they have to say on their panels.
We need to learn how to listen.
Maybe their different approach is to take this post and study the way you slipped information to the reader without hitting them over the head.
Thanks, Patricia. I hope readers can enjoy the story, then relate.
My favorite history class in college was when the professor, and I wish I could remember his name, told us stories filled with facts. THEN I could relate, instead of that school rote to memorize names, dates, and locations, without understanding the relationships and interactions.
Thanks for today’s writing prompt!
In 2000, I changed my approach.
I was trying to sell a mystery series to traditional publishers. Still like it.
Couldn’t get an agent, but kept trying for several years, while writing and planning the next books. Fairly typical writer path.
It might even have worked eventually.
But a bunch of things happened around the same time in 2000, and, having a kid at Carnegie Mellon, I was thinking of Pittsburg and the confluence of rivers, and I had my own little confluence of streams of thought, and they joined at a nexus of some kind, and the whole thing gelled in the ether and fell in my lap.
The streams were, among others:
From actors of a generation, which ones ‘win’, become famous, get the big roles,
How are disabled people seen as ‘less’ by society, including in their aspirations,
Why are people admired if they make something of adversity, but only in their ‘box’,
What does it take for an actress to become ‘America’s Sweetheart,’
What do you do with what’s left when a tragedy destroys your planned life,
Is friendship required as a basis for a joint life,
Is deceit a tactic which can be forgiven…
I have been working to answer those questions and more for the twenty-five years I’ve been writing Pride’s Children – even if it really doesn’t qualify as a mystery except in ‘How the heck does this thing work out in the end?’
Right now, only I know – because I didn’t start the writing – and learning how to write better – until I had the answer. The third volume will tell you. I think the other two, already published, make the questions clear: How far can characters go to achieve what they want? Where is the line?
From the very beginning of the final volume:
Every decision he makes from here on will hurt someone.