Category Archives: writing

A Writer Goes to Hell

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This little nugget is courtesy of author Michael Haskins. Enjoy!gate_to_hell_1

A writer died, and due to a bureaucratic snafu in the hereafter, he was allowed to choose his own fate: heaven or hell for all eternity. Being very shrewd for a dead person, he asked St. Peter for a tour of both.
The first stop was hell, where he saw rows and rows of writers sitting chained to desks, in a room as hot as a thousand suns. Fire licked the writers’ fingers as they tried to work; demons whipped their backs with chains. Your typical hell scene.

"Wow, this is awful," said the writer, appalled. "Let’s see some heaven."

In a moment, they were whisked to heaven and the writer saw rows and rows of writers chained to desks, in a room as hot as a thousand suns. Fire licked the writers’ fingers as they tried to work; demons whipped their backs with chains. It looked and smelled even worse than hell.

"What gives, Pete?" the writer asked. "This is worse than hell!"

"Yes," St. Peter replied, "but here your work gets published."

Things I’d Rather Forget

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by Michelle Gagnon

MIB memory deviceI was at a cocktail party over the weekend, talking to a friend who recently read my last book. “How do you do it?” She shuddered. “Writing about all that stuff. I couldn’t sleep nights.”

I explained that I usually enjoy the research, which inspired a fresh round of shudders. “Ugh. Don’t you wish you didn’t know about it?”

I was about to explain that in fact, writing about the dark side of the human condition can make it seem less scary. But I stopped myself. Because when I really thought about it, I realized there are things I’ve stumbled across in the course of doing research that I would much rather not know about.

The subject of when violence crosses the line into gratuitous territory is a perennial source of debate for mystery groups. I generally don’t participate. While I can’t sit through a slasher film, and rarely read horror, even the most explicit scenes of most thrillers don’t unsettle me. And that’s not entirely due to the fact that I’ve become desensitized (although that’s probably part of it). What always crosses my mind when I read diatribes against that level of violence in books is this: if you only knew. Honestly, I havebundy no idea how homicide investigators sleep at all, considering the things they encounter in the course of doing their job.

When I was writing BONEYARD, I immersed myself in everything I could find on serial killers. And believe me, the reality is so much worse than anything depicted in fiction. I made the mistake once of mentioning a tidbit about Bundy to my husband over dinner. His fork froze over the plate, and he gave me a look I’d never seen before, saying, “Please, don’t ever say anything like that again during dinner. Or ever. I don’t want to know.”

perrino On The Daily Show the night before the Inauguration this week, Bush’s press secretary Dana Perrino appeared in a taped segment during the show’s final moments (and no, I’m not making this up) and donned a pair of sunglasses. Holding up a replica of the memory-erasing device immortalized in Men in Black, she said, “This will just take a minute. Please focus on this spot.” It flashed, and the segment ended.

There are times that I want that device. Terrible stories pop into my head at inopportune moments, flashes of the very worst people are capable of. So maybe my friend was right. There are things I’d rather forget.

Ten Stupid Things Cops in Books Do

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Robin Burcell .2008.Today The Kill Zone is thrilled to host Robin Burcell, despite the fact that her credentials make some of us feel horribly inferior in comparison. For more than two decades Robin has worked in law enforcement as a police officer, detective, hostage negotiator, and FBI-trained forensic artist. As if that wasn’t enough, she’s won an Anthony Award for her Kate Gillespie series. We especially appreciate her post since it addresses cliches that can be terribly vexing for crime fiction fans. One lucky commentor will receive a signed edition of her latest book. Read on to find out more…

Let’s say you’re writing a book (or perhaps reading one) and you want to verify that the cop stuff is correct. Where do you turn for accurate info?

The secret is… watch CSI. 

Just kidding. The real secret is to ply me or any other current or ex cop at mystery conventions with alcoholic FaceofaKiller mm c beverages, then remind us of whatever promises we made in our drunken state to answer questions you might have on your work in progress. But what’s a writer to do if they can’t get to those conventions and bribe us with free drinks? I thought I’d compose a Top Ten Stupid Cop Things in books to help you guide your way until you can meet us in the bar.

10. Getting the jargon/slang wrong for a particular department or part of the country. It’s more than the age-old discussion on perps versus suspects. I’m talking the everyday lingo. It’s the difference that tells me which generation of cop is talking. Saturday Night Live could have done a whole skit on some of the double entendres of this stuff. Typical phrase heard on the radio: "Put your unit at the back door." For years I resisted, instead calling my or anyone else’s "unit" by the more recognizable name of "patrol car." We won’t even go into the whole "back door" thing. And I also resisted calling the detective bureau the "dick squad." I don’t think I was the only generational upstart who started reshaping the language in a department.

9. Really dumb radio transmissions no cop would ever make. Short transmissions are a must. In real life, if you have a long transmission, you “break," for any emergencies that might arise while you’re hogging the mike. So if your characters are busy saying anything longer than one or two short sentences on the radio, have them pick up the phone instead. Radio transmissions vary by region. Some talk in "ten" code, some in "nine,” and many are moving to "plain English," because who the helllpd car remembers the damn codes when the $#!+ hits the fan?

8. Not knowing the elements of the crime, or what constitutes a crime. A cop looks up, sees a young lady falling to the ground, sees a man running away, and thinks: Purse snatch, a felony. He and his partner jump out, chase after the suspect. One problem. No one saw the crime. They assumed. At least have your cops stop and ask the victim before they get in a foot chase, tackle the suspect and cuff him for a crime they think he committed–because when those officers get to court, the defense is going to rip them apart.

7. The clichéd loner, alcoholic cop with the rumpled raincoat, whose wife and kids were murdered by the serial killer while he was out eating donuts. Wcoffee-bagelshy doesn’t this scenario work? Because the whole donut eating thing is so passé. Let’s pause for history. Donut shops were the only thing open on graveyard shifts where the coffee could be found. That cliché would never work in California. There’s a Starbucks on every corner, and a bagel shop two doors down. And who buys their bagels from Starbucks, when you can get really good ones from Noah’s? 

6. Having cops hired/fired on a whim. Unless a cop resigns on his own, it’s almost an act of congress to hire or fire one. But an even bigger pet peeve is the shoddy hiring background investigations I’ve seen in some really Big Name novels. Backgrounds that allowed, say, the FBI to hire someone who had an arsonist serial killer for a father, but the father’s guilt (and the suspect’s identity) are questionable, and so we should be surprised when our agent turns out to be the real killer. And if they do pass the background, are you saying these arsonist/serial killers are going to pass the psych? There’s a reason why it takes months to complete the background investigation. It almost takes that long just to fill out the background application, which is longer than the average book contract.

5. Evil or stupid police supervisors. Repeat after me: Only some of the bosses are evil or stupid (and no, they didn’t all work for my department). There are actually some pretty decent supervisors still out there. The standing joke is that to get promoted to Sergeant, you have to first have a lobotomy. To make it to Lieutenant and Captain, you have to have your spine removed. True in all cases? No. But some…

4. The hated, despised Internal Affairs cop, who is usually evil or stupid. See # 7 above (which is not to say that if you’re the one being investigated, you don’t tend to think of the IA cops that way, but that’s a different story).

3. Dirty cops planting phony evidence in that overdone bad cop cliché manner. If you’re going to write this, do it better than anyone else. One of the best scenes I saw in a movie was where a dirty cop was seen committing a crime on a surveillance video which was booked into evidence and was going to nail him. The dirty cop set up a “window smash” of a business—with a highly magnetic device used to shatter the window. It in turn was booked into evidence right next to the surveillance tape, which it then demagnetized and was rendered useless. Such a scenario would be difficult to accomplish in this digital age, but back then it was way cool.

howdunit_lofland2. Stupid blunders at crime scenes. Being aware of what can contaminate a crime scene takes more than simply watching the latest episode of CSI. Just knowing the basics can help, everything from keeping a crime scene log to what constitutes trace evidence and cross-contamination. Keep this in mind next time your sleuth picks up a phone at the scene of the murder, tromping across a carpet, leaving fiber evidence.

And the top ten pet peeve, in my opinion?

1. Bad officer safety. This is equal to the sleuth investigating a noise outside, when she knows the killer is lurking around somewhere. Cop-wise, I’m talking things like cops showing up at a suspect’s house without backup. These guys are assigned partners for a reason. Safety is one of them, but so, too, is having a second set of eyes and ears for investigative purposes, as well as for testifying later in court. I hate it when writers shove the TSTL syndrome (too stupid to live) on their characters to foster an exciting climax.

So, aside from the age-old "safety on a Glock", what are your stupid cop (or amateur sleuth) pet peeves in books?

Robin Burcell, a veteran cop of twenty-something years, dutifully avoids all the above pet peeves in her latest novel, FACE OF A KILLER, about an FBI forensic artist. You can verify this fact by reading the first chapter on her website

My Obsession with Twilight

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twilight And no, I don’t mean the wildly successful book by Stephanie Meyer, or the film based on the book. Although I hear they’re both excellent.

Something became painfully clear to me last week as I mapped out the timeline for my next book, The Gatekeeper. Since I never start with an outline, one of my final acts before handing in the draft is to map out exactly when and where each scene takes place. The main action in all of my books occurs over roughly a week, give or take; that’s never the problem. No, what I invariably discover is that almost everything happens at night. Particularly at twilight. I’ve been known to have twenty-five incidents of twilight in a weeklong span. It’s not pretty, trust me.

I wish I knew where this unhealthy predilection originated. I’m a big fan of the daytime, and there’s no good reason why, in a thriller, critical scenes can’t take place, say, mid-afternoon. There is admittedly something spooky about the darkness, but in Gatekeeper, spookiness wasn’t really what I was after. So why was the sun constantly going down?

Another problem I quickly discovered: teleporting. This is the first time I’ve attempted to write across time zones. My first book took place entirely on a college campus, then with the second I widened the scope to a region (The Berkshires). Now I’m attempting to portray multiple points of view scattered across the country. Worse yet, the characters fly from one to the other with abandon. Or rather, based on evidence in my initial draft, they teleport, since they frequently get from New York to California in mere minutes. Even with the time change, they probably shouldn’t be landing at precisely the time they left: twilight, of course. (Although after traveling over the holidays, I’m wondering if teleporting is ever going to be a possibility. I’d even settle for a flying car: weren’t we supposed to have those by now? A two hour flight from Phoenix involved three hours of waiting at the airport, another two on the tarmac, no water, threats to divert to Monterey, and an extra $100 because we dared to check bags. Beam me up, Scotty).

So I spent the better part of a week mapping out the action scene by scene, minute by minute, checking flight times to insure that my characters were experiencing the same travel nightmares the rest of us undergo on a regular basis. (It’s pretty much the only time in my life I use Excel, but wow, I love that program. I just wish it was easier to get everything to fit on one printed page).

I rewrote scenes so that characters were no longer darting through the shadows cast by moonlight. I eliminated their flashlights and night vision goggles (another weakness of mine: flashlights have been prominent in nearly every book. There must be some sort of twelve-step program that deals with this). I gave them sunscreen instead and pushed them out the door into the light.

After a lot of work, I got it down to a week of sunrises and sunsets, with plenty of light in between. There are, granted, still scenes that occur at night, but at least now it’s not all of them. And as always, now that the draft is done, I’ve promised myself that next time in an effort to avoid this problem I will absolutely try to work off an outline. (I won’t, though. I never do. I might as well promise to stop eating mass quantities of soft cheese, it’s just as unlikely to happen.)

 

Story Logic—Spell It Out

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by L.J. Sellersljsellerssmall

Today The Kill Zone is thrilled to host the lovely and talented L.J. Sellers, author of The Sex Club, which I recently read and thoroughly enjoyed. Without further ado…

For the last two days, I’ve been filling in the details of my outline, working out the timeline, and crafting a sizzling ending that brings it all together. I’m already 50 pages into writing Thrilled to Death, and it felt like to time to solidify some plot points. I know many writers don’t do this; they prefer to wing it and see where the story takes them. (Stephen King, for example) I rather envy that style.

But I write complex mystery/suspense novels, and the outline/timeline has become more critical with each novel. In a police procedural, so much happens in the first few days of a murder investigation that a timeline is essential. For complex, parallel plots with multiple points of view, mapping the story in detail is the best way to avoid writing yourself into a dead end or writing 48 hours worth of activity into a 10-hour time frame. I speak from experience.

TheSexClubThen yesterday for the first time, I put in writing what I termed story logic. I’ve always done this in my head to some degree, but this was the first time I put it on the page in summary form. In a mystery/suspense novel, some or much of what happens before and during the story timeline is off page — actions by the perpetrators that the detective and reader learn of after the fact. Many of these events and/or motives are not revealed until the end of the story. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to convey to readers how and why it all happened.

So I mapped it out—all the connections, events, and motivations that take place on and off the page. Bad guy Bob knows bad guy Ray from prison. Bob meets young girl at homeless shelter. Young girl tells Bob about the money she found . . .

It was an enlightening process, and I highly recommend it. Summarizing the story logic forces you to think specifically about character connections and motivations. It points out holes and inconsistencies and gives you an opportunity to tighten and improve your plot. It may even force you to rethink and rewrite your outline. But it also may keep readers from getting to the end of your novel and thinking, How did he know that? Where did that come from?

I mentioned the process on a Twitter/Facebook update, and another writer asked me about it. So I explained it to her (in 140 characters!). She got back to me with this message: “I wrote the foundation of my book and did the ‘story logic’ for the rest before writing thestorylogic book to fill in details. It led me in a completely different direction. I took some risks in the outline and a lot fell into place. I’m psyched!”

I admit, all of this takes some of the spontaneity out of the writing process. But for me, writing isn’t magic. It’s work, and it needs the same detailed planning as any other project. Of course, I’m flexible. If better ideas or connections come to me as I write, I will modify my outline and resummarize the story logic.

Do you map the story logic? Do you outline? Can any of you wing it with complex crime story?

L.J. Sellers is an award-winning journalist, editor, novelist, and occasional standup comic based in Eugene, Oregon. She is the author of the highly praised mystery/suspense novel, The Sex Club, and has a second Detective Jackson story, Secrets to Die For, coming out next year. When not plotting murders, Sellers enjoys cycling through the Willamette Valley, hanging out with her extended family, and editing fiction manuscripts.

What I’m Thankful For (and a pumpkin cheesecake recipe)

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Of course, there’s the usual: my health, my family and friends, the fact that I didn’t have to board a plane today and brave the madding crowd. I’ll be enjoying my turkey right here in (relatively) warm and sunny California, thank you very much.

pumpkin But this year, I do have a little something extra to be thankful for: my new two book contract. Because as many of my writing friends have recently discovered, this is a tough, tough environment for book sales. I share writing space with nine other authors. Two of them had contracts fall through in the past few months. Two others have manuscripts that their agents think would have gone into a bidding war earlier in the year: but as of right now, they haven’t had a single offer.

With the news that Houghton Mifflin has stopped acquiring manuscripts for the time being, many writers’ worst fears are confirmed. Forget the automakers: how are writers going to survive the economic downturn? Is it time for us to hand in our private jets, God forbid? If my contract had been negotiated after the crash, I suspect my publisher would never have offered the amount we settled on. In this industry, so much comes down to timing.

Of course, it’s not as though much happens between Thanksgiving and New Year’s in the publishing industry anyway. Much as they are loathe to adjitneymit it, it’s the only American profession that seems to mirror the European vacation calendar. Most agents won’t even bother trying to shop a manuscript this time of year. And August: fuggedaboutit. The Da Vinci Code could land in an editor’s lap and they’d toss it aside while rushing off to catch the jitney to the Hamptons. Mind you, I’m all for that. Especially since most editors spend their days in meetings and their nights and weekend working on manuscripts. It’s definitely not a job you go into for the money, by and large. So time off is well-deserved.

But parissince the lack of acquisitions at this time of year is largely a given, why did Houghton Mifflin even bother making the announcement? Their "temporary freeze" is a bad sign. Will it last through January, or longer? Will it spread to other houses? Does this mean that the publishing industry is throwing in the proverbial towel, and will eventually only publish a handful of titles every year about vampire detectives with difficult (but beloved) dogs who reveal religious conspiracies while recording their downward spiral into drug addiction followed by their inevitable redemption? Or, God forbid, Paris Hilton’s latest musings on hair, boys, and other national security issues? Because let’s all just admit that Paris Hilton can walk into pretty much any publishing house and get a seven figure deal before you can say "Salman Rushdie."

The irony here is that all things considered, books are cheap entertainment. And historically, entertainment has done well during economic bulldogdownturns, when people need to take their minds off their troubles. Little known fact: more books sold during the Great Depression than in the period immediately before and after. Sure, in the new millennium we have many other distractions available to us, from television to video games to bulldogs on skateboards. But what if the publishing industry banded together and advertised reading as the ultimate inexpensive pastime? Something along the lines of the dairy industry’s "Got Milk" ad campaign? Who knows, it might make a difference. And hoping to shore up the industry by releasing fewer and fewer titles doesn’t seem like the best option.

Anyway, that’s my thought for the day. And I’m hoping that by the spring of 2010, when my renewal comes up, the economy will have recovered somewhat. Until then, I’m honing my vampire knowledge base.

As promised, my killer (no pun intended) Pumpkin/Ginger Cheesecake recipe, in case you’re in charge of dessert:

Ingredients

  • 1 gingersnap crumb crust baked and cooled
  • 3/4 cup sugar
  • 1/4 cup chopped crystallized ginger
  • 8 ounces cream cheese, softened
  • 2 large eggs
  • 1/4 cup whole milk
  • 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
  • 1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1 cup canned solid-pack pumpkin (from a 15-ounces can)

Preparation

Make the gingersnap crumb crust:

  • 5 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted, plus additional for greasing
  • 1 1/2 cups cookie crumbs (10 graham crackers or 24 small gingersnaps; about 6 oz)
  • 2 tablespoons sugar
  • 1/8 teaspoon salt
  • Special equipment: a 9- to 9 1/2-inch pie plate (4-cup capacity)

Put oven rack in middle position and preheat oven to 350°F. Lightly butter pie plate.

Stir together all ingredients in a bowl and press evenly on bottom and up side of pie plate. Bake until crisp, 12 to 15 minutes, then cool on a rack to room temperature, about 45 minutes.

Cook’s notes: • To make cookie crumbs, break up crackers or cookies into small pieces, then pulse in a food processor until finely ground. • For pumpkin ginger cheesecake pie, use 4 (not 5) tablespoons melted butter plus additional for greasing.

Then, for the cheesecake part:

Keep oven rack in middle position set at 350°F.

Pulse sugar and ginger in a food processor until ginger is finely chopped, then add cream cheese and pulse until smooth. Add eggs, milk, flour, nutmeg, and salt and pulse until just combined.

Reserve 2/3 cup cream cheese mixture in a glass measure. Whisk together remaining 1 1/3 cups cream cheese mixture and pumpkin in a large bowl until combined.

Pour pumpkin mixture into gingersnap crumb crust. Stir reserved cream cheese mixture (in glass measure) and drizzle decoratively over top of pumpkin mixture, then, if desired, swirl with back of a spoon. Put pie on a baking sheet and bake until center is just set, 35 to 45 minutes. Transfer to a rack and cool to room temperature, about 2 hours, then chill, loosely covered with foil, at least 4 hours. If necessary, very gently blot any moisture from surface with paper towels before serving.

They’ll love it, trust me.

The Dog Rapist

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The Kill Zone is thrilled to welcome author Scott Pratt for a discussion of outlandish cases and how they can influence your work. Publisher’s Weekly called AN INNOCENT CLIENT a “brilliantly executed debut,” and awarded it a starred review. I can attest that it’s a remarkable book, not to be missed.

INNOCENT CLIENT1 People often ask me what it was like practicing criminal defense law, representing guilty people, being close to murderers and rapists and various other scumbags. They want to hear the stories. I write about those stories now in my novels, but there’s one that’ll never make it into a novel. A couple of years ago, a good friend of mine who worked for the public defender’s office found himself representing a dog rapist…

These are the facts:

Truck driver and wife fall out of love. Wife leaves home and files for divorce. Truck driver is miserable, drinks too much, and becomes lonely. Wife has moved into an apartment that doesn’t allow pets, forcing her to leave her beloved Irish setter with the truck driver. The only way she can see the dog is to visit her former home. She usually goes by right after work – around 5:00 p.m. – and lets herself in with her key. This particular day, however, she is forced to work late and then runs a couple of errands. Believing her soon-to-be-ex-husband is out of town, she stops by to say hello to the setter. When she walks in through the kitchen and enters the living room, however, she is greeted by a horrifying scene – hubby is on his knees on the floor in the corner, trying to insert his penis into the dog. Wife calls the cops.

Scott004 Under the Tennessee animal cruelty statute, a person could be found guilty for committing a litany of offenses against animals: starving them, neglecting them, beating them, etc. But screwing them was not one of the elements listed in the statute. This important bit of information was passed along by my buddy to hubby, who was relieved to know that he couldn’t be convicted under the animal cruelty statute. What’s more, Tennessee does not have a statute on the books that makes having sex with an animal a criminal offense – called a “bestiality” statute in many states. Subsequently, hubby took a hard line and refused to plead guilty to any offense. He didn’t want to pay any fine, he didn’t want to pay any court costs, and he didn’t want to do any time in jail or be placed on probation. He even asked my friend about suing the police to recover the money he had to pay out for bail. When my friend relayed this information to the district attorney prosecuting the case, the D.A. said, “Fine. I guess we’ll have us a little trial in a couple of hours.” In the meantime, the prosecutor got on the phone and called the local media and asked them to come down to the courthouse. He filled them in briefly on the details, and being the dedicated journalists they are, they came running. The prosecutor also asked the wife to go get the dog and bring it to the courthouse.

After the lunch break, hubby walked in and saw the dog sitting with the wife in the hallway outside the courtroom. He also saw the television cameras and the reporters. He asked my friend what was going on, and was told that someone had apparently called the media to cover the trial.

“What the hell’s the dog doing here?” the hubby said.

“She’s here to testify that the sex was Ruff!” my buddy said.

Okay, that last line is a lie. But the rest of it’s true. Once he was confronted with the possibility of testimony being presented in a public trial, hubby pleaded guilty to animal cruelty, paid a fifty-dollar fine and served fifteen days in jail. His explanation to my buddy for his conduct? “I was drunk. Besides, I wouldn’t have hurt her none. Me and her has always been close.”

Hubby moved away less than a month later. Nobody’s heard from him since.

The stories that do make it into my novels are all based – sometimes loosely, sometimes not – on things I’ve done or seen, things I’ve been close to in the profession of criminal defense. It’s a fascinating world, full of zany characters, but it’s also a world that can be dangerous. The murderers aren’t always handcuffed, the guards aren’t always close enough, everyone you meet seems to be playing some angle, and there are guns and steel bars at every turn. I felt like I was suffering from battle fatigue when I finally got out, but I’m glad now that I stayed as long as I did. I have enough material to write at least ten more novels.

You might be saying to yourself, “Good for you, but I’ve never been a lawyer. Where am I going to get that kind of material?”

All you have to do is look around. Conflict is everywhere, and the world we live in is filled with danger. Mix in a little talent and a little imagination, and it’ll appear from the murk. The nugget we’re all panning for… drama.

What would you do?

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By Clare Langley-Hawthorne
www.clarelangleyhawthorne.com


Having spent most of the weekend with a sick toddler with stomach flu (thankfully it afflicted only one of the twins – so far at least!) I was reminded once again of how motherhood has changed me. I absolutely hate any kind of stomach ailment but as I comforted my distressed son I found myself wishing that it was me, not him, who was going through it all. As a mum all I want is to take away my children’s pain. I feel a ferocious sense of protectiveness that has never extended to anyone else. I certainly empathize when my husband is sick, but do I wish it was me instead? Not on your life. When it comes to children though – there is no limit to what I would do.

I haven’t ever explored this in my writing but as a reader I have found a renewed appreciation for books such as Sophie’s Choice. When I first read this I was horrified and saddened but I had no real point of reference. The decision, unimaginably awful as it was, remained an abstraction. Now I’m not sure I could re-read the book, I would feel so such a visceral reaction to the decision that Shopie had to make. How could a mother decide which of her children would be saved?

The power of fiction for me is how character’s decisions – their guilt and torment – resonate with readers. I have found that since becoming a mum there are certain things that resonate now that never fully resonated before. It may sound obvious but I think this fact alone has made me realize how as a reader my experiences have changed the reading experience as well as the craft of writing. I don’t think now I could face writing about crimes against children – for the horror of such things now affects me in a way it never did before. I could, however, imagine a parent (and I’m not just limiting myself here to women) doing almost unimaginable things to protect their children. The question for me is not what would a parent resort to in such-and-such a circumstance but what would they not do.

If a visceral response to a character’s choice and actions is so dependent on a reader’s own life experiences, I wonder how, as a writer my work will change and grow. Will there ever come a time when I can dispassionately write about things that, as a mother, I now find impossible to even contemplate? I certainly would have no problem writing about a mother who would totally kick-ass to protect her children. Sarah Connor would have nothing on what I could imagine doing.

What books have resonated with you based on your own experiences? What issues provoke such a visceral response that you too feel like you would take up the Sarah Connor mantle?

Speak Up!

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by Joe Moore
scream Is it just me or has anyone else noticed how hard it is to talk after spending so much time in front of a computer writing thousands of words? It seems that the longer I spend writing, the more my ability to speak with others has diminished. When I’m at a social gathering or pretty much any situation where I try to communicate verbally, I tend to open my mouth and stammer or stutter as fragments of thoughts shoot out like shrapnel. Talking with others in real-time doesn’t allow me to craft my speak with first drafts, second drafts, rewrites, spell check, and thesaurus comparisons for alternative words. After all, I’ve spent hundreds of hours in a dark room with my eyes going buggy from the glow of my monitors while I labor over choosing just the right verb, avoiding passive voice, trying to catch myself from falling into the trap of using useless adverbs and flowery adjectives, cliches, over-writing, under-writing, starting my thoughts in the wrong place, line editing, plotting, split infinitives, dangling–well, you get the idea. As a writer, talking to others has become hard for me.

I find myself ordering pizza on the Internet from Papa Johns and Dominos so I don’t have to talk to the person at the store. I send faxes, emails, text messages, IM, anything to get out of talking to someone. I even email my wife in the next room.

Talking has become painful. It seems that the more I write, the worse I speak. I open my mouth and people give me a pitiful, “I hope he writes better than he talks” stare. I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that I spend the majority of my day in the company of imaginary people?

Is this a byproduct of writing novels or is it just me loosing my ability to communicate with my mouth? Maybe I should consider voice recognition software. I wonder if those programs can interpret verbal gibberish? So, is it just me or what?

You’ve got to be Brave. The Revision Process at One AM.

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By Clare Langley-Hawthorne
www.clarelangleyhawthorne.com

I’ve spent the whole weekend knee deep in revisions for my latest manuscript and I believe me, this aspect of writing is as challenging as writing the first full draft. Granted I forced my husband to be on twin duty the whole time, so he’s probably still recovering too, but it made me realize how much the writing process really is just that – a long and detailed (often arduous) process.

Writing historical fiction means that I have to incorporate a sense of time and place that is backed up by significant amounts of research. It also means that at every point in the revision process I find myself second-guessing historical accuracy. Not just the big stuff like making sure my characters aren’t jumping aboard the Concorde in 1912 but the little stuff, like the nuances of speech, use of slang, and the way people perceived the world around them. Sometimes I have to confess, if I don’t know and can’t find the answer I just go with my gut and make it up. Hey, this is fiction after all.

I view revising as adding the second and third coats of paint to a project – each layer adds a subtly and a depth to the characters, to the setting, and to the themes that swirl around the plot. What I find the biggest challenge is avoiding what I call ‘tinkering’ – changing my mind over a minute plot point only to find it has rolling ramifications and then (in total disgust) I find I have to go all the way back and return it all to the way it was. I guess this is what people call a ‘learning process’ but I seem to be a bit ‘learning challenged’ when it comes to this – and still find myself adding complexity where NO MORE is needed! ‘Keep It Simple Stupid’ is a motto I need to have branded to my forehead.


Those who want to see the writing process in action can find me sitting in my writing studio, a converted garage in the back of our house, bleary eyed at one o’clock in the morning, determined to finish the next chapter as I’m ‘on a roll’. I might be on the internet checking on a historical reference, looking up the architecture for a historic home or searching The Times database for an event the latest fashions for that year. I might even be using the delete key to liberal advantage as part of the revision process involves getting rid of all the extraneous stuff that I find stops the flow of the narrative (sometimes bringing tears to my eyes if it was a point of historical research I spent hours on!)

Yesterday I deleted a whole chapter – painful but necessary. I then merged two minor characters to streamline the plot. I decided one scene moved like molasses and I got bogged down in worrying whether the house should have gothic archways or not…Time passed. It was one am…Time to call it quits till the red pen, the axe and the delete key were brought back out to do it all again.

Ah the joys of revision. You just got to be brave…