Rejections

By Jeri Westerson

The dreaded rejection. Does it ever end? Even published authors are not immune from rejection, I'm sorry to say. Being published does not guarantee that you are gold. Short stories in magazines, other novels in other genres...there's a long list of ways to be rejected. I thought I'd share a few of my collection over the years. Some of you may know that I started off writing historical fiction and really couldn't get my foot in the door. But the kind of historicals I liked to write--ordinary people in extraordinary settings--seemed to translate better into mystery. So I had many years of rejections. Mostly, they are form rejection letters. Often, it is a note scrawled on my query (when such things were done on paper). These were for agents and editors for my first Crispin book.

I think my favorite one was a rubber stamp slammed onto my query letter that said, "Not Interested." They were so anxious to get this rejection back to me that they didn't even seal the envelope!

By far this was the most frequent statement I received--probably the most frequent statement any author receives--especially on form rejections: We don't believe it is suitable for our list at present.

Here are just a few.

• I think you have an interesting premise--a detective mystery set in the Middle Ages. Unfortunately, I just didn't fall in love with the writing. 

• Thank you for sending this interesting piece, but we've decided to pass on the project.

• This manuscript is well written--the writing flows naturally, and it's a pleasure to read. But I'm afraid I think, on a basic level, if you've read one (medieval mystery), you've read most of them. I find, generally speaking, that medieval mysteries are just stories, often rather thin stories, dressed up in not-a-costume: Originality = poor, Setting = poor, Characters = almost good, Dialogue = good, Plotting = almost good, Excellence in writing = very good

• I thought this medieval mystery was well done but not compelling enough to overcome our marketing concerns (historical mysteries tend not to sell well for us in mass market.)

• The novel contained a convincing recreation of late medieval dialogue and atmosphere, but I'm afraid I wasn't as involved in the historical plot and characters as I needed to be. 

• We already have one British medieval series on our list and to add a second seems unwise.

• I truly enjoyed your story and look forward to reading another one. Unfortunately, this one does not meet our needs at this time.

• Protagonist seems motivated only by his immediate circumstances. We need more background angst to make him truly interesting. 

Really? Crispin needs more background angst? Boy, this is depressing me. Does it depress you? It's just as bad as any reviews that contradict each other. It just shows that opinions vary. I must remind myself that not only did I get a great agent at last, but also an editor and publisher who believed in the books. Despite the flaws of the publisher's marketing strategy, the books have all been nominated for peer and reader awards. Even with my most recent release, SHADOW OF THE ALCHEMIST, it's been nominated for tehe RT Reviewers' Choice Award for Best Historical Mystery, and Suspense Magazine named it one of the Best of 2013. Go figure. Even though the Crispin books may be down, they are definitely not out.

The takeaway from all of this is "Don't Give Up." I had many years of rejections from both agents and editors. Fourteen years of them. Just because one project doesn't work, be ready to move on to the next. You never know what will catch fire or with whom.

Reading and Memory

by Sheila Connolly

As I read my newspaper at dawn this morning (I'm trying to avoid the heat—five a.m. can be very pleasant, I've found, and yes, I still read a paper made of paper), my eye was caught by a short article in the "Be Well" section, with the headline "Reading and writing preserves memory, researchers say."

Briefly: Researchers at Chicago's Rush University Medical Center, where there is a Memory and Aging Project (per their website, still recruiting participants, if you're interested) announced this week that a multi-year study they have conducted strongly suggests that "participants who reported reading and writing throughout their life, especially in old age, were 32 percent less likely to show deterioration in brain regions involved in memory," and "those who reported infrequently reading and writing into old age experienced a 48 percent faster rate of memory loss."

I feel so much better.  Okay, the study involved only three hundred octogenarians and depended upon answers to a survey (and we all know they aren't always accurate) as well as physical observations upon autopsy, but it's encouraging nonetheless.  The old adage "use it or lose it" still applies.

I've been reading before I can remember, and I've never slowed down, as my overflowing bookshelves can attest.  I've been writing for over a decade now (longer if you want to count academic papers in my younger days, as well as grant proposals and reports a decade or two later).  But who knew that I was preserving brain cells all the while?

Carl Sagan is reported to have said, "The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous." How rare is it that something that feels good is also good for us?  And even better, we as writers are performing a valuable service to our readers, by providing them with books that will help sustain their brain function for years.

And now I have another justification for all those books in my To-Be-Read pile:  I'm stockpiling therapeutic tools.  I'm not sure how well that rationale (rationalization?) applies to the thousands of books I've saved over the years, but I might want to reread them.  Would it be a sign of aging if I can't remember whodunnit in some of them?

Memory is a tricky thing.  Sometimes we rewrite our own, or we selectively mask or erase certain parts.  I had an odd conversation with my husband this weekend, when I described in detail a wonderful O'Keefe and Merritt gas stove we had in the first house we owned, and he had no memory of it at all.  (For the record, he used it as much as I did.) Wiped from his databanks.

In return, he accuses me of blotting out the second car we bought together.  Maybe.  I think he drove it a lot more than I did, commuting to work. I had a different car at the same time, and I can tell you a lot more about that one.

Sometimes these days I feel the need to document everything in the house, particularly items I've inherited from four generations of my family, because I'm the only one who knows what they are and where and who they came from, and my daughter won't know what each piece means, when she comes to inherit it.  I haven't done it yet.  But this weekend I sorted through my t-shirt collection, and I can still tell you when I acquired each one, and where and why. Maybe I'm just practicing. (I have a lot of t-shirts.)

But reading is something else.  It seems to be using a different part of our brain.  I'll be happy to sacrifice my memories of my t-shirts if I can continue to enjoy reading and writing.

Writers' Moments

by Sheila Connolly

People who don't write won't understand why sometimes their writer friends go still, with a distant look in their eyes.  No, it's not a form of seizure:  we're just paying attention in a different way.

It often happens unexpectedly. Every now and then, we'll be going about our normal business, and a little bell goes off in our head:  this would be great for a story.  It's like a switch is thrown, and  suddenly all your senses are on high alert.  You're paying attention to details—sights, colors, the space around you, facial features, voices, and just about anything else.  Or maybe it's like when your cat suddenly sits up and pricks its ears, watching or sensing something you haven't even noticed yet (my cats once spotted a mouse coming down the stairs on the other side of the house in the dark).

It can happen anytime, anywhere.  For example:  this past weekend I attended a (non-writer) conference, and stayed in a slightly shabby midrange hotel in the Boston suburbs.  I was headed downstairs for the cocktail hour, and when the elevator arrived on my floor, there were already two people on it, clearly a couple.  And that alarm went off in my writer head, and I started making mental notes (all the while trying to look like I wasn't looking at them, of course, and obviously I don't have pictures).

The details:  both thirty-something, tall, attractive, fit, well groomed and (for lack of a better word) interesting-looking.  He was wearing beige dress pants and a sage-green fine-waled corduroy jacket that looked like suede, so smooth that I wanted to touch it.  She looked a little more "artsy," with slim jeans, layered shirts and a scarf.  They were a well-matched pair.  They never said a word during our three-story ride down to the lobby.  Neither looked like they were trying to impress anyone, but they definitely didn't look like they belonged at that hotel—I would have put them in Cambridge or Boston. I really would like to have known who they were and what they were doing there.  But I didn't ask.  That would spoil the spell.

All this in less than a minute.  I will file them away and use them somewhere, like when one of my protagonists gets on an elevator, and the people already in it make her feel like she should turn around and change clothes, get a haircut and find a new job.

Something similar happened when I was in Ireland last fall, on a much bigger scale.  I had the chance to visit the pub that is the model for Sullivan's Pub in the County Cork series. When I first saw it, it was called Connolly's. In its heyday it was a widely-known music venue in Ireland (far beyond the regional level—musicians whose names you'd recognized have played there, even though it can hold no more than maybe a hundred people, at least legally).  I hadn't been inside in over ten years, and it's no longer open, except for special events. But I wanted to see how accurate my memories were, so I knocked on the door because the woman in the café down the street had told me that the last Connolly owner still lived above the pub, and she was there, and I ended up spending a couple of hours in her parlor with her cat on my lap talking about the old days. Of course I was delighted to be there, and of course I was taking pictures of the place like crazy.

There went that bell in my head again. I realized that the whole plot of the third book in the series had just fallen into my lap. Not just bits and pieces, but the whole story. Suddenly I was looking at details in a new way, and figuring how I could use them to give the story color and substance.

And that's one of the joys of being a writer—the gift or the craft of seeing in a different, more intense way, and then sharing that vision with other people.

Are We Rich Yet

by Sheila Connolly

Gee, thanks, Patricia Cornwell, for skewing the curve.

Patricia Cornwell, successful mystery writer, lives in Boston these days, and the details of her very public lawsuit against her money manager have been all over the local papers recently.  She won her case.  Good for her.

But it's the numbers that are staggering to most of us writers.  Cornwell said she made $89 million (yes, million) over four years, and the financial firm she employed to keep track of it managed to misplace or misspend all but $13 million of it. 

I don't know Patricia Cornwell personally, but I've read and enjoyed her books.  I even read the non-fiction book she wrote about Jack the Ripper, a departure from her usual genre stories, that she published because she felt strongly about the historical case.

But twenty-two million dollars a year in income from writing?  That's astonishing, at least to me.

I don't have statistics in front of me (probably because they're depressing), but most writers can't expect to make any income at all until they sell a book five to six years after they start writing and submitting.  That's if they're lucky, because over 90% of writers never get published at all (that may be changing in the era of self-publishing).  And then, if they are lucky enough to capture the attention of a publisher, they may get a four-figure advance (against future earnings from sales).  No string of zeros.  And worse, that amount has to go toward paying for a website and traveling to conferences and buying ads and promotional materials and memberships in professional organizations.  The net income?  Pretty much zip.  The message? Don't quit the day job.

If you're a writer, even one no one has ever heard about, and you tell a stranger that's what you are, a surprising number of them say, "oh, you must make a lot of money."  Where does that idea come from?  I'd like to think it's a sign of respect, that people believe that writing is difficult and that successful efforts to write should be rewarded financially. Except it's not true, except for a small group at the top. Like Patricia Cornwell, or Lee Child, or Nora Roberts.

Most of the writers I know, both obscure and recognized, work very hard.  They do research.  They agonize over their manuscripts, from the first draft to the fifth edit.  They slog through all kinds of weather to do book signings and sit on conference panels.  And they do it over and over again, for each new book.  And each time they worry, is it any good? Is it as good as the last one? Will people like it?  Will they buy it?  You might wonder why we torture ourselves like this when we could be librarians or accountants or farmers.  We do it because we love it and can't stop ourselves

Okay, I'll admit it:  when I began, like so many others I thought writing would be an easy way to make money.  I was smart and educated, and I had read a lot of books.  I could write a book, couldn't I?  And sell it, and pay for my daughter's Ivy League education? 

Stop laughing.  I was wrong, or at least my timing was.  But I did discover that I loved writing, and that's why I stuck to it during all the lean years.  It wouldn't have been possible without a husband with a steady income, but that spurred me on—if I was going to pull my weight income-wise in our family, I was going to put everything I had into writing, twenty-four seven.  Otherwise it would be an expensive hobby.

Robert Frost captured some of this in his poem Two Tramps in Mud Time:

My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done

There is nothing better than having someone tell you, I loved your book!  That means you've said something that touched someone else, and that's not easy.  Sure, I'd like to touch enough people to generate twenty-two million dollars in income each and every year, but I'm not complaining because I love what I do.  And my husband still has his job.

Patricia Cornwell, I'm glad you are amply rewarded for what you do, and I'm glad you nailed that guy who thought you wouldn't notice a few tens of millions of dollars missing here and there.  But I plan to keep writing even without the millions.

The Story Behind the Story: Finding the Shape of a Novel

by Sandra Parshall

This is one in a series of occasional posts about the mechanics of the novel-writing process.

I’ve always resisted crime fiction formulas – first plot point here, drop a second body on page XX, etc. – but my books all seem to take on the same shape naturally, without a lot of conscious thought. It’s not so much a formula as a design I find appealing as both a writer and reader.

It looks a lot like a snake that has recently downed a hefty meal. Apologies to all of you who just winced and exclaimed “Yuck!” But the comparison is apt.

The book I’m writing now, sixth in the Rachel Goddard series, is assuming that familiar shape. As always, I will find plenty of room within it for sharp turns in unexpected directions, but basically, it’s a stuffed snake.

As a reader, I want a crime story to get off to a fast start. For some writers, I may be willing to hang in there, but in most cases I’ll abandon a book rather than wait fifty pages for something to happen. With my own books, I try not to test readers’ patience with too much set-up material. I like to kill off the victim in the first chapter. My first book, The Heat of the Moon, isn’t a murder mystery, so this doesn’t apply, but I did throw readers into Rachel’s emotional turmoil as quickly as I could. In Disturbing the Dead, the first victim has been missing for ten years, but I open the first chapter in the middle of a search for her scattered bones on a mountaintop. In subsequent books, someone turns up dead in the first chapters.

That’s the big plot point, the inciting incident, the event that sets the plot in motion. After that swift, shocking bite at the beginning, I have to hold onto readers, make them care enough to stick around.

The second chapter opens out the story a bit, brings in additional characters, and begins to show the effect of the crime on people around the victim.

I’m always a bit baffled when writers moan about the “middle muddle” in their books, because I believe the middle is where all the best stuff should happen. That’s when the story balloons like a snake’s midsection after a large meal.

The middle of my books is where both Tom and Rachel dig around in the lives of other characters, uncovering nasty secrets that may or may not have a bearing on the plot, getting to know aspects of people they haven’t seen before, bringing motives into focus. A murder can have wide-reaching consequences. A murder changes the lives of those left behind, whether they’re connected to the victim or the killer. All of this comes to light in the middle of a book. It could turn into a muddle if revelations aren’t carefully controlled, but if information is carefully rationed, the result is suspense.

I someyimes find it necessary to kill off another character about three-quarters of the way through the book. If I choose to do this, the killing must be meaningful, it must increase suspense and tension, not merely add to the bulge of baffling information. It has to push the story toward its conclusion.

A snake devouring a meal might not be the most pleasant mental image, but that’s what I see when I visualize the shape of my story.

Can you see the underlying shapes of novels you’ve read (or written)? Name your favorite crime novel and tell me what you see when you consider its shape.

Storytelling

by Sheila Connolly

This week I heard Dennis Lehane speak to a packed hall—of librarians, not writers, at the New England Library Association conference.  I've crossed paths with him before, at the late-lamented Kate's Mystery Books in Cambridge, and at the New England Crime Bake, but I've never heard him give a speech.  Now I know what I've missed.

 

 

Lehane admits that he was an unlikely candidate to become a writer, based on his upbringing in some of the rougher parts of Boston.  But writing does not always emerge from book-learning, although he always loved reading, even when that was scorned by his classmates.  Or more precisely, male ones; the women found it appealing that this tough kid could quote Shakespeare and actually write books. That alone was a good incentive to pursue a literary career.

 

But I don't intend to write a biographical tribute to a writer, even one I admire.  What pleased me was I can still learn something about what makes a writer, and Lehane made his case convincingly. 

 

The part of his talk that resonated most with me was Lehane's description of his (large) Irish family and how they interacted with one another.  The members of the extended family (if I heard it right, his father was one of 17 children, his mother one of 14) all spent a lot of time together when he was growing up, and they, or at least the men, were all prodigious tellers of tales.  Moreover, those tales were often repeated within the family gatherings (Lehane estimated about every five to six weeks the story cycle would begin again).  But what was noteworthy to him was that the tales changed with each telling, just a bit, as they were polished and honed with repetition.  Now, you'd think that family members who had heard the same telling dozens of times before would notice this, but the important point was, it was the telling of the story that mattered, not the truth of it.

 

And that statement says so much about Irish tradition, or at least what I know of it.  The Irish people have a long tradition of oral storytelling.  The seanchaí  fulfilled a dual role as both storytellers and historians—guardians of a culture that was often imperiled by British rule. Some may have been the designated member of a given clan or family (remember, families in Ireland in the 19^th century or earlier seldom strayed far from their origins, so effectively they functioned as an oral archivist); others were itinerant, and offered up entertainment, given a meal and a place to sleep as they passed from townland to townland, in exchange for their stories. 

 

Is the art—or craft?—of this storytelling an historical artifact of a dwindling culture, or it is something innate in the sons and daughters of Ireland?  Lehane didn't address that issue, nor did he wax eloquent about his literary heritage.  Instead, what he took away from all those family gatherings (and later, gatherings of like-minded strangers in friendly bars) was the love of words, of the spinning of a tale, of drawing in an audience who had heard it all before and making it new for them. I'll let you decide whether he used wisely what he learned (I'd say yes!).

Forty Words for "Looked"

Sandra Parshall

(I'm at that hair-pulling stage again, feverishly working on last-minute changes to a new book for my editor and trying to root out all the overused words that dot the landscape of my novel like stubborn dandelions. This post, which first appeared here in slightly different form back in the earliest days of Poe's Deadly Daughters, remains as sadly appropriate as ever.) 

People who keep track of such things report that the English language has almost one million words. Why, then, do I have so much trouble finding an alternative to “looked”?

Every writer will know what I’m talking about. It’s that broken-record thing your mind does without your conscious awareness. I can write a complete first draft without realizing that I’ve used a vocabulary of 200 words, tops. When I shift into rewrite mode, my inner editor is aghast to discover the same verb two dozen times -- in every chapter. She looked. He looked. They both looked. Again and again and again.

[Pause to bang head on desk.]

Out comes my copy of the Rodale Synonym Finder. Peered? A specialty word to be used sparingly, but great in certain contexts. Peeked? How many adults ever peek? Glanced and stared are easy to abuse, and like looked, they can multiply faster in a manuscript than hangers in a closet.

When I begin a manuscript with the intention of avoiding looked, some other word invariably moves in and takes over. Glared is one of my worst rough draft habits. My characters, always a high-strung lot, glare at each other, at traffic, at stormy skies, at inanimate objects and life in general, all the way through the first draft. I never realize I’m doing this while I’m doing it.

[Pause for more head-banging.]

My only remedy is to read through the first draft and make a list of overused words so I can replace them next time around. I’m dismayed at how little this list varies from one manuscript to the next. [Do you ever learn? Apparently not.]

English sometimes feels like a blunt-force weapon to me, lacking the delicate calibration of other languages. We don’t have marvelous words like Weltschmerz and Schadenfreude and hikikomori to convey complex emotional states. To say the same thing, writers and speakers of English have to string several words into a phrase or an entire sentence. Even angst and macho are borrowed from other languages.

Alaskan Native Americans have forty words for snow, to denote its many states and textures. I have three: snow, the generic white stuff; slush, what the generic white stuff becomes when it lands on warm pavement; and snirt, the dirty mounds of once-white stuff that are created by plows and always seem to last into May.

English may not have forty words for snow, but it has plenty of alternatives to said, and enthusiastic writers try to use all of them. I am no exception. Ironically, though, said is one word that should be allowed to stand in most cases, because our characters become ridiculous when they’re constantly exclaiming, shouting, pleading, crying, whispering, expostulating, etc. Said is believed to be invisible to the reader, regardless of how many times the writer uses it -- unlike, for example, looked and glared. So I often find myself striking some of the alternatives and upping my said total in later drafts. Then my editor tells me to replace most of the dialogue attributions with action.

 

I confess to feeling a mean little spark of glee when I realize that a well-known writer has failed to tame a bad word habit. One bestselling author is addicted to the word coursed. Adrenaline coursed through him. Anger coursed through her. Panic coursed through her. Joy coursed through her. And, of course, desire coursed through him. The author’s books are popular all over the world, which indicates that little or no irritation has coursed through her fans.

Are writers the only people who notice these things? Do they matter at all to readers who are not writers themselves? Maybe not. Maybe a book with incessantly glaring characters would go over well with readers. But as long as my overused words make me want to bang my head on my desk, I’ll continue to keep my list and spend days finding alternatives before I declare a manuscript finished.

Yes, you can earn a living by writing

Sandra Parshall

A lot of novelists couldn’t live on their book royalties, but according to the U.S. Census Bureau and the Department of Commerce, the class of writers and authors as a whole earns more money than the average American.

That’s one intriguing finding from a study by the National Endowment for the Arts of data in the American Community Survey (2005-2009). The study found 197,768 people who identified writing as the occupation in which they worked the most hours in any given week. People who write for a living made up almost 10% of the nation’s 2.1 million artist workforce. Their median income was $44,792, compared to $39,280 for the general population of workers. The NEA suggests this may be due to the higher than average education level among writers – 84% had at least a bachelor’s degree, compared to 32% of the overall workforce.

One especially gratifying finding: Among writers and authors, women earned nearly the same amount as men. Women also outnumbered men: about 57% of writers were female, compared to 47% of the overall workforce.


Where do writers work? About 44% were self-employed, compared to 10% of the total workforce. The highest concentration, 32.8%, was in the “performing arts, spectator sports, and independent artists” category; 17% earned their living by providing professional services; and 20.4% worked in information industries such as films, video, broadcasting, newspapers, books, or directories. About 9% worked for the government, the highest percentage of any group of people in the arts.

Where do writers live? New York and California had the highest number, but writers were also numerous in Oregon and Vermont. However, the state that has the most book publishing jobs is Minnesota, and the concentration of book publishing employment in Minneapolis is eight times the national average. New York comes in second, followed by Massachusetts and New Jersey.

Some other intriguing findings: only 13% of writers and authors were nonwhite or Hispanic, compared to 32% of the general workforce, and only 7% were foreign-born, compared to 15% of all workers.

Do any of these figures surprise you?

Recycling--the Literary Version

Sandra Parshall

I was happy to hear Ian McEwan on the radio last week, describing his habit of saving deleted passages from his novels because they might contain “nuggets” he can use in later work. I don’t have much in common with this renowned writer, but we’re alike in one way: we both practice a literary version of recycling.

I don’t reuse only the nuggets, though. I recycle characters, subplots, whole scenes. Like one of my cloth tote bags, many elements of my books used to be something else.

When Disturbing the Dead was published, I wrote about the transformation of a character who first appeared in a manuscript titled Outside Agitators, a story about young antipoverty workers and the Appalachian people they tried to help during the War on Poverty. I worked on that novel for years and never turned it into a coherent story with a proper ending. But I’ve been carving away chunks ever since and using them in other books.

One of those chunks was a teenage mountain girl with red hair and freckles and the unlikely name of Lana Turner. She longed to leave the poverty-stricken hollow where she grew up and move on to a better life. When I wrote Disturbing the Dead, I kept Lana’s dreams but made her a little older and gave her a Melungeon – mixed race – heritage, which meant changing her coloring to olive skin, black hair, and bright blue eyes. My agent told me I would also have to change her name, because some editors disliked characters with famous people’s names. Lana became Holly Turner.

I wasn’t finished cannibalizing my old unfinished manuscript. In the original, I wrote about antipoverty workers as young idealists, well-intentioned but naive about their power to effect change in a region where gigantic energy corporations control the economy and politics. When I began working on Broken Places (released in February), I asked myself what some of these people would be like decades later, if they had stayed on after their government service ended and tried to continue their activism on behalf of the poor. Maybe they would have had some small successes over the years. Most likely, they would have experienced far more failures and been forced to swallow a bitter dose of disillusionment.

I plucked Cameron and Meredith Taylor from the pages of Outside Agitators, fast-forwarded to the present, and made these two disappointed idealists my murder victims. Meredith, I learned for the first time, had a secret ambition to be a writer, and her final – unfinished – manuscript was titled (ta da!) Outside Agitators. In its pages, Captain Tom Bridger of the Mason County (VA) Sheriff’s Department discovers clues to the motive behind the murders.

Mrs. Lily Barker, the self-educated woman from Disturbing the Dead who believes she has “the sight” (that’s what Appalachian natives call the ability to see beyond the tangible world), wasn’t lifted from any earlier work of mine, but she was inspired by a minor character in Outside Agitators who was too colorful to discard. Mrs. Barker proved popular with readers, and a woman who attended one of my library events made me promise to bring her back, so she returns in Broken Places and also shows up in the book I’m currently writing.

Mason County, my invention, is similar to the mountain community in the original Outside Agitators, but it’s in southwestern Virginia rather than West Virginia, and even the coal companies have largely deserted it by now. In my work in progress, though, Tom will pay a visit to a mountaintop mining operation. Other writers may favor idyllic small communities, but I’d rather write about places where sudden gashes of ugliness mar the natural beauty and decades of lies and rivalries and betrayals simmer just under the surface, ready to erupt and bleed all over the present.

All those years I poured into Outside Agitators, with no end in sight and little hope of ever seeing it published, have paid off richly, and I suspect I’ll use still more chunks of it before I’ve exhausted its possibilities.

When I delete a passage from a work in progress, I’m careful to stash it in a file rather than throwing it out. There must be some reason I wrote it in the first place, and if it doesn’t seem to fit now, it might be just what I need to fill a hole in a future story.

A Mother's Writing Is Never Done

Toni L.P. Kelner

I have two daughters, and I’ve often thought that writing is one of the best possible jobs for a parent. I work at home, the hours are flexible, and now that my girls are older, I can even work once they come back from school.
But lately, I’ve come to realize an even bigger benefit. Writing is the perfect job for bugging the heck out of my kids.

Let’s look at some of the parental pluses to the writer lifestyle, organized into a bulleted list:

• There’s an endless supply of puns and bad jokes. I mean, I get to say things like “bulleted list” and then add, “Har! Bullets! Isn’t that perfect for a mystery writer!” Remarks like this are almost guaranteed to get an eyeball roll, and in some cases, even a groan. I get extra points when I make this kind of remark in front of my kids’ friends.

• I get to groan about how hard my job is. So when my eighth-grader complains about having to write a five-page paper over the course of a semester, I can drop a manuscript in her lap and tell her what my deadline is. Ditto for when one of her teachers insists on extra drafts or corrections--I go through many more drafts than most students, and copy editors are far more annoying than teachers. So she gets no sympathy from me, even though she really hates to accept that somebody else has a rougher time than she does.

• Staying at home looks wonderful from the outside. No matter how hard I actually work, all my daughters see is me hanging around in my nightgown as I chase them out the door into the wet, cold, or even snowy weather. It’s even better when I grin while I wave good-bye, or mention that I’m going to crawl back into bed for another hour as soon as they’re gone.

• My kids freak a little over the violence in my books, and even more over the sex scenes. Admittedly, my books are hardly the most violent ones on the shelf, and I don’t let the girls read that kind of book anyway, even if it is one of mine. But they do hear me discussing creative methods of murder, how long rigor mortis lasts, and great places to hide a body. I get some strange looks during those conversations, let me tell you. As for the sex, my Laura Fleming books were pretty light on that, too, but the protagonist in my new series is a single woman with an active sex life. Again, I won’t let my kids read the book, but you should have seen them wince when I told them why I won’t let them read Ton. No kid wants to admit her mother even knows about sex, let alone writes about it!

• Going to the bookstore makes them crazy. Not that they don’t love going to bookstores, mind you. We’re all book lovers around here. The part that drives them insane is my pointing to books and saying, “I know Donna Andrews. I did a panel with J. A. Konrath. I don’t know Mary Higgins Clark, but I did a panel with her daughter Carol.” I can even get a rise out of them by pointing and saying, “I’ve never met John Grisham.” The corollary is pointing a Harlan Coben book and saying, “I know you don’t remember, but he hugged you when you were just a baby.”

Admittedly, there are some downsides, like when my older daughter started to read Down Home Murder, and then didn’t finish it. Did she hate it? Did she lose it? What’s the problem? And it can be embarrassing when the other didn’t get an A on her English paper, especially since I’d read it over for her.

But overall, a writing parent is a happy parent. After all, these are only the everyday joys. Just wait until career day....

Toni L.P. Kelner is the author of the "Where are They Now" mysteries and the Laura Fleming series. Wolfsbane and Mistletoe, the second anthology she's co-edited with Charlaine Harris, recently debuted on the New York Times best seller list.

The Chipmunk and the Writer

Sandra Parshall


Sometimes I feel a lot like a chipmunk.

No physical resemblance, of course – I’m nowhere near that cute. But while photographing the chipmunks in our yard (great way to avoid writing), I’ve noticed some behavioral similarities.

We both spend much of our time cut off from the rest of the world, emerging periodically to blink at the sun and remind ourselves that there is an existence beyond our burrows. While the life’s work of a chipmunk is foraging for food to stock its larder and mine is foraging for words and thoughts to fill my books, we take much the same approach.

We both have to be selective. We can’t grab whatever happens to come along. We must examine all possibilities and choose something that will be worth our effort, something that will last. We’re both perfectionists.


Watching a chipmunk figure out what to do with a peanut I’ve offered him brings a jolt of self-recognition that makes me smile and groan at the same time. My “peanut” may be a sentence, a paragraph, a bit of backstory, a description, but the same trial-and-error method applies.

It has to go in here somewhere, but where will it fit best?


Ah ha. Right here.


Or maybe not...


I’ll see if it works better over here.


Nope. Back to the first spot. But does it really feel right there?


Oh, heck. It’s time to move on!


For the chipmunk, there’s always another peanut. For me, there’s always another rewrite.
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Boy Books and Girl Books

Elizabeth Zelvin

Not long ago I heard an eminent editor admit that in his publishing house, people refer without irony to “boy books” and “girl books.” Since I became active in the mystery community, I have heard many discussions of the fact or belief that, by and large, men will not read books, or at least novels, by women. That’s why many female writers conceal their gender behind initials, although like the initials in phone book listing, the use of initials in authorship has become a signal that the person thus identified is probably a woman.

Men may object to this generalization, which oversimplifies as generalizations always do. It might be illuminating to ask what books by women they read. Are they “boy books” written by women? Are they crossover books? Noir is very fashionable these days, and women as well as men are writing noir. Megan Abbott comes to mind—a woman who had already written a scholarly examination of the tough guy in American fiction before her first novel was published. Or how about women whose prose style is “tough” and would have been called “masculine” before the women’s movement? I think of SJ Rozan, a writer I admire greatly, of whom I like to say (when I can get away with it) that her prose is built like a brick s***house. Not a wasted word, not a dangling clause, not an adverb. It doesn’t hang together—it grips.

A hundred years ago, when I was a college English major, there were two kinds of writer, or rather, two prose styles: Hemingway and Henry James. Hemingway’s the guy who put the kibosh on polysyllabic words of Latin derivation and made action verbs king of the sentence. Back then, it was possible to say, “I don’t warm up to that Hemingway style. I don’t know that I want to write that way.” I know, because I said it, and no one lynched me. Today, that choice has become an absolute. I heard the highly respected Stephen King tell an audience how to be a writer the year he was made a Grand Master of Mystery Writers of America: “Read, read, read. Write, write, write. And lose the adverbs.”

I confess I have mixed feelings about abolishing a whole part of speech, maybe a quarter of the English language, by fiat. Actually, adverbs aren’t lost. They have migrated to the other side of the aisle, where the girl books sit. I learned this from a prolific and talented short story writer named Tom Sweeney. He’s been published in Ellery Queen and SF magazines and also in Woman’s World, which I’ve heard is a tough market to crack and pays well. Tom told me Woman’s World wants adverbial writing. When he writes for that particular market, he makes sure he puts those adverbs in.

Am I saying women don’t write nice tight sentences with action verbs? No, of course not. And I can delete an adverb with the best of them. I think it’s subject matter, focus, and sensibility, to use an old-fashioned word, rather than prose style that separate the boy books from the girl books.

I’ve written before about relational psychology—the theoretical approach that explains how and why men mature through separation and women through connection. Separation and autonomy—the tough-guy loner PI—boy books. Connection and relationship—mysteries, and not just cozies—girl books. Another psychological model uses the gender-related concepts of instrumental and expressive traits. Instrumentality is about how stuff works. Expressiveness is about how people feel. Instrumental—technothrillers—boy books. Expressive—romances, sure, but also character-driven mysteries—girl books.

Am I exaggerating? Still oversimplifying? Of course. But like the eminent editor, I’m making the point that there are boy books and girl books. Let’s tackle the distinction from another angle. Let’s look at the Great American Novel. Suppose we lived in a less patriarchal society. Suppose we had always acknowledged that there are boy books and girl books that have to be judged separately on their merits within their own categories, the same way there’s a male winner and a female winner in the New York Marathon. Here are my picks. Great American Novel, boy book division: Huckleberry Finn. Great American Novel, girl book division: Little Women.

How many men have read this wonderful book? Its author created characters so real that it’s still in print almost 140 years after publication, still read for pleasure—and with pleasure—by millions of readers, and still capable of moving readers to tears on an umpteenth rereading, as well as inspiring some of us to become writers like its protagonist. My husband has. I’m proud to say he’s read almost all of Louisa May Alcott, motivated by an interest in the vivid and accessible picture of life in 19th century New England in the context of Transcendentalism, whose theorists included Emerson, Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott, Louisa’s father. He (my husband, not Bronson Alcott) also wanted to know what was in those battered books that I was crying over every time I read them. I’d like to hear from any other man who has.

It helps to be a little crazy...

Sandra Parshall

Have you ever seen a farmer standing next to the broccoli in a supermarket, extolling the virtues of his product to shoppers and begging them to purchase a stalk or two?

It’s an odd concept, but is it any weirder than seeing a writer in a bookstore, trying to sell her books one copy at a time?

I can’t think of any other profession that requires so much direct salesmanship from the person who creates an item for public consumption. Sure, actors and directors go on TV and give print interviews to promote new movies, but they don’t stand outside theaters and try to persuade passersby to purchase tickets. Promoting the movie is primarily the job of the production company that packages it and gets it into theaters. When a book is published, though, the burden of selling it shifts to the writer, usually at the writer’s expense. If the book tanks, it’s the author’s fault.

Writing books is a strange pursuit. You might complete half a dozen or more novels before you actually sell one. When you do finally make that breakthrough, the odds are you’ll receive a small advance against royalties, no more than a few thousand dollars in compensation for the year or more that went into the writing. You won’t receive another payment until your book has earned back the advance and begun to make a profit – if it ever does.

Most publishers expect writers to do bookstore signings and maintain a web site, at a minimum. Writing a blog and creating an “internet presence” on sites like MySpace is also rapidly becoming a requirement. Genre writers are urged to travel to conferences – which can cost $1,000 or more each when you add in transportation, lodging, and meals – to meet fans and spread the word about their books. Ironically, only authors who are paid large advances receive financial help with promotion from their publishers, and even then only the cost of a book tour will be covered. The unknown writer with a small advance usually must take on the full expense of promotion. That small advance rapidly vanishes, and the writer may soon find herself paying for the privilege of being published. Promotion also eats into the time that an author would otherwise devote to writing, and that makes it harder to finish the next book on schedule.

Every time a survey of writers’ incomes is conducted, only a fraction of novelists report that they earn enough from their books to live on. Small wonder, then, so many work at salaried jobs to pay the bills or do various kinds of journalism or business writing to generate income. It’s not at all unusual for a novelist to work a day job, write at night and on weekends, somehow fit in book signings and conferences, write a blog, and maintain a web site with frequent additions of fresh material. Oh, and family life fits in there somewhere too.

So why would anybody want to write a novel? The most common answer authors give is, “I write because I can’t not write.” It’s a compulsion and an obsession. It’s a joyous act of self-expression. It’s a journey of imagination that takes you away from the mundane world for a few hours at a time. It’s a chance to assert control over events, to make a story come out exactly the way you want it to.

If writing is such a personal thing, why do we go through the ego-wrecking process of trying to get our work published, then trying to sell it to the public? Why can’t the writing be its own reward? I wish it could be, and I wish I fully understood why it isn’t. All I know is that a writer needs readers to make the last link in the creative circle. A story that is never read by anyone other than its author is incomplete. It’s a bird singing in an empty forest.

And so we go on writing, hoping that some stranger in a publishing company will like our work enough to invest in it, praying that it will find readers, knowing the financial rewards are likely to be meager. We write because we must, and for those hours when we’re alone with our evolving stories and characters, that is reason enough.

How being a shrink is like writing a mystery

Elizabeth Zelvin

I’m at a stage in life when about half my friends are reaching retirement age—specifically, those who have been doing the same thing, such as teaching or working for the government, for thirty years or more. Having managed to reinvent myself several times over the course of my adult life, I’m farther from retirement than ever. And that’s okay.

Each new manifestation of who I am and what I do has in some way built on the choices that I’ve made in the past. Without going into all the ideologies and isms I’ve traveled through, or the lifestyle choices and personal roles, I can say that the overall movement has been from writer to therapist to writer. Along the way, I got sidetracked into various publishing jobs in the mistaken belief that they would help me be a writer. (Okay, they did make me a demon editor, which helps.) Similarly, I’ve performed various functions as a social worker and administrator that did not exactly add up to being a therapist. But the heart of what I’ve wanted to do has remained the same.

Writer SJ Rozan talks about the mystery (or crime fiction in general) as one of the great ur-stories in our culture. It is a story of righting wrongs and seeing justice done, and that is why we want to hear it over and over, says Rozan. If publishers and film and movie makers won’t give us good stories, we (the reading public, the media consumer) will take bad stories, so great is our hunger to see things made better, villains caught, safety restored, unfairness exposed and punished, and everything put back in place. We’d like law and order in real life, but too often we’re offered only a tarnished simulacrum. So we’ll take it however we can get it: in the stories we tell and hear.

Therapy is also about righting wrongs. It can’t enforce the law or get wrongdoers, in most cases, to acknowledge and correct their faults. Therapy doesn’t work that way. But to those hurt by the acts and deficiencies of others, it can provide corrective experiences. Those who’ve been rejected and abandoned can experience unconditional love. Those who have repeatedly chosen abusive partners can learn to select and sustain healthy relationships. Those who have internalized harsh parental criticism can come to accept and nurture themselves. It may not sound like an exact analogy for investigating, discovering whodunit, and putting the culprit in the slammer. But in a way, it’s close.

I’ve found that what I do as a therapist—listening—is a lot like what I do (fate and the publishing industry willing) as a writer—being heard. EM Forster’s famous tag, “Only connect,” sums it up for me. In both roles, I am seeking the human connection. I am trying to make contact with another human being, whether it is the client who pours out his or her soul without knowing much about me beyond my capacity for empathy and compassion, or the reader to whom I pour out my own soul and the fruits of my imagination without knowing any more of him or her than their willingness to open my book.

Being a therapist, like being a writer—and a reader—is a way of opening the door to a secret garden. One of the greatest rewards in both is the closeup view I get of other people’s lives. Both legitimate my elephant’s-child curiosity about others’ innermost feelings, passions, and motivations. When I write fiction, I even get to make the other people up, so that I can explore all the possibilities my imagination can reach. At the same time, I make myself vulnerable to every reader who sees my work. That is both scary and exciting. Back in my poetry days, in a poem called “Secrets of the Therapeutic Relationship,” I wrote:

between therapist and client
more tender intimacies are shared
than if we two lay touching on a bed

The same is true of writers and their readers.

Reviewers/Readers . . . what do they mean to this writer?

By Lonnie Cruse



Reviews...What do they mean? Readers, how important are they?


Fifty-Seven Heaven is getting great reviews, which will certainly help promote my book when Five Star releases it on December 12th for readers to buy. (Shriek, am I ready? Have I covered all my bases? Deep breath, deep breath.) The book recently got positive reviews from Kirkus and Publisher's Weekly, which was a huge thrill. The latest review on Books N Bytes is at:



http://www.booksnbytes.com/authors/cruse_lonnie.html



Scroll down to Pat Reid's name and click for the great review. Another great review is due out December 10th at: http://www.romrevtoday.com/



So, aside from me bragging and blatently self promoting (BSPing), what does this mean to an author? Well, for me, I sit in my home office most days, by myself, and plunk out my story, wondering if anyone will ever want to read it. Then I do the first revision, and often I'm surprised to read something I don't remember writing. Sometimes I'm even surprised at how much I love it. Then more revision.



Then I send it to my critique group. Sometimes they're devided on an issue, which means I have to choose which of their suggestions to follow. Of course, I'm prone to take the suggestion closest to my thoughts. Hehe. But if all of them are puzzled by something I've written, (which was perfectly clear to me, so what's the problem???) I obviously have to clarrify that issue for the reader. If all of my critiquers hate something, I have to change it. Sigh. And if all of them love it, I take a bow before my moniter. Ego, don'tcha know.



Then comes more revision. Then I send it to friends who aren't writers or critiquers but who catch errors the group missed, and I missed. And I fix those. And take more suggestions. By this time I'm becoming thoroughly sick of the story. Who would ever want to buy it? Or read it? OR reivew it? And there is likely another story floating around in my head that I want to write because, did I mention, by now I'm sick of the story?



Then I send it to the editor who finds errors the other dozens of readers--not to mention me--missed. Then the publisher makes advanced reader copies and sends them out to reviewers. Now the REAL fun begins. Will they love it? Hate it? I chew my nails and wait.



The reviews come in and I'm (a) shocked that they like it and (b) wondering if anyone will review/buy/read/like the next book I'm working on. Circles within circles. Around and around.



Beyond all that there are times like right now, at the busy holiday season, when I'm trying to find the right gifts, spend time with family, host a party or two, wrap, bake, cook, get some sleep, and writing time is scarce. Think hen's teeth. Family time is hard to come by, with everyone inviting everyone else over. So we're all busy, scrambling to get it all done. Sigh. And I'm wondering if I should go back to the simpler time when my time was my own, not my computer's.



Why do I write mysteries? Who will want to read them? Sitting alone at the computer, day after day, is tough. Time away from family life is tough. Getting critiques is tough. Revising is tough. Then I get a positive review, and I'm back at the computer, writing and wondering. Is it all worth it?



Ummm, yeah, it is. It's worth it when reviewers tell others they liked it. Or even when they don't. Because chances are, others will still be curious enough to read it. And then they write me to say they loved it. Which means they understood what I was struggling to say. They entered my world and spent time there with me. So I wasn't really alone. Thanks, reviewers AND readers. And please, keep reading!

Write, write, write...and smell the roses

Valerie Wolzien (Guest Blogger)

The best advice you can give a writer is write every day. It’s great advice, but sometimes, I think, you need to stop and smell the roses…

Somewhere out there are writers who, when they sit down to type page one, already know what will be on the final page of their manuscript. Many spend months making detailed plot outlines. They have notebooks (or computer files) crammed with descriptions of characters: everything from age and hair color to preferred breakfast food. They research locations and topics before they start writing and they don’t lose their notes only to discover them long after the complete manuscript is safely in their publisher’s hands. These paragons may work in the modern day equivalent of an ivory tower: a table at Starbucks, a private corner in the local library, or just a room of their own where they can close the door, positive no one will interrupt. Many claim that they write every day and they never, ever get up from their desk without completing a few thousand words.

Not me. I think of myself as a seat of my pants sort of writer. When the only thing on the page – or screen – is Chapter One, I rarely know more than who my main characters are (when you write series mysteries, that’s one thing you always know), who will die, and what the setting/season/situation will be.
And it’s fun to write the way I do. Since I don’t know how my characters will develop they frequently surprise me. Since I don’t know what I’m going to need to know when I begin, I can justify taking off to do a little research from time to time. I stay interested in my plot and I hope that means future readers will as well.

On the other hand… characters sometimes develop in directions that don’t fit in with the plot. I pick a murderer and then discover half way through the manuscript that I like him or her too much to make that character the killer. And sometimes I get stuck. Really stuck.

And if that happens to you, I’m going to suggest something slightly radical. Stop writing. Get up and go smell the roses. Or do whatever smelling the roses is in your life. Bake a cake. Take the dog for a long walk in the woods. Pull out those weeds strangling your impatients. Soak in a warm bubble bath. Get a pedicure. Find a road you don’t know well and go for a drive. But whatever you do, do it alone. This is not the time to call a friend and hit the mall. You need to clear your mind, not provide a social distraction. Your writing may be important to your family, but don’t ask them for tea and sympathy. This is time for you and you alone – time to let your subconscious do a bit of the work.

And sometime you’ll have an “ah ha” moment. The answer to your problem will appear almost miraculously. Sometimes. And it if doesn’t?

Sit back down in that chair and write, write, write.

Valerie Wolzien is author of the Susan Henshaw mysteries and the Josie Pigeon series.

The Joy of Diction Begins Early

by Julia Buckley



I blogged at Mysterious Musings yesterday about my son's gift for writing. What I have realized recently is that, like me, both of my boys take a certain joy in words and the way that they can express their individuality through the language that they choose.

Here's a recent example. I overheard my seventh grader telling his friend that a boy in his science class had asked him (my son) for the answers. Ian had responded that he most certainly would not give his. I, nosy mother that I am, interrupted here with my concern that a boy would ask for the answers. Ian shrugged dismissively. "He's just annoying, Mom. He's an oily turd." And then, after some thought, he added, "He's a moist foot." I happen to know the boy in question is none of these, but I was impressed with my son's precise diction--with his attempts to convey a feeling with specific words.

My younger son impressed me equally recently with his description of a bright night sky: "Mom, look! The moon looks like a toenail clipping." And it did look like that--just like that. They have the instinctive desire to avoid cliche descriptions and go right for the honest response, which is often a surprise.

Today both boys were playing Playstation, despite the fact that it was beautiful outside for the first time in ages. I expressed displeasure with their indoor game, and immediately my nine-year-old began to complain. "We're almost finished with this level," he said indignantly. "Why would we stop when we've almost beaten the game?"

Ian, more savvy in the politics of manipulation, said, "Graham, don't! If you want to finish playing we must appease the Mom-god, not anger her."

That's my eldest son in a nutshell. Later he made up an "appeasing the Mom-god" dance, which involved some solo hopping and then some collaboration with his beagle, who is ever willing to jump.

Underneath my disdain for their sass, however, is a joyful realization that they are young poets--that they will use their words to describe their worlds, to understand themselves, to control their destinies to the extent that they can be controlled.

They are writers at heart, and I can only be proud.

Only So Many Stories: The Seven Original Plots

Elizabeth Zelvin

I first learned that there are only seven original plots
by reading Emily of New Moon, my favorite book as a child. I found the text of L.M. Montgomery’s 1923 classic about the other little orphan girl on Prince Edward Island on the Internet at Project Gutenberg of Australia, which states its “eBooks are created from printed editions which are in the public domain in Australia.” So I can cite the memorable passage:

“I’m in a scrape and I’ve been in it all summer. You see”—Emily was very sober—“I am a poetess.”

“Holy Mike! That is serious. I don’t know if I can do much for you. How long have you been that way?”

“Are you making fun of me?” asked Emily gravely.

Father Cassidy swallowed something besides plum cake.

“The saints forbid!...Have another slice av cake and tell me all about it.”

“It’s like this—I’m writing an epic….My epic,” said Emily, diligently devouring plum cake, “is about a very beautiful high-born girl who was stolen away from her real parents when she was a baby and brought up in a woodcutter’s hut.”

“One av the seven original plots in the world,” murmured Father Cassidy.

“What?”

“Nothing. Just a bad habit av thinking aloud. Go on.”

“She had a lover of high degree but his family did not want him to marry her because she was only a woodcutter’s daughter—”

“Another av the seven plots—excuse me.”

“—so they sent him away to the Holy Land on a crusade and word came back that he was killed and then Editha—her name was Editha—went into a convent—”

Emily paused for a bite of plum cake and Father Cassidy took up the strain.

“And now her lover comes back very much alive, though covered with Paynim scars, and the secret av her birth is discovered through the dying confession av the old nurse and the birthmark on her arm.”

“How did you know?” gasped Emily in amazement.

“Oh, I guessed it—I’m a good guesser.”

Is that priceless or what? I’ve quoted as little as I could bear to. Having been imprinted on Father Cassidy’s list, but not having read it for many years, I’ve always assumed the list of seven ran something like this:
. Boy meets girl
.The lost heir
.The disguised hero or role reversal
.The hero’s quest (with subsets that include David and Goliath, Hero saves world, and Disney’s favorite, The lost mother)
.Coming of age (or is that another subset of The hero’s quest too?)
and let’s round out the list with two plots essential to mystery writers:
.Boy murders girl
.Sleuth solves crime

When I consulted the Internet, I found that not everybody’s list of seven is the same as everybody else’s. On several sites, I found (with and without attribution), this very different list. The reference is Foster Harris, William. The Basic Patterns of Plot. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1959.

.[wo]man vs nature
.[wo]man vs man
.[wo]man vs. the environment
.[wo]man vs. machines/technology
.[wo]man vs the supernatural
.[wo]man vs. self
.[wo]man vs God/religion

Yet another seven are proposed by Christopher Booker in The Seven Basic Plots. London/NY: Continuum, 2005.

.Overcoming the monster
.Rags to riches
.The quest
.Voyage and return
.Comedy
.Tragedy
.Rebirth

And I can’t resist quoting a passage from a review of Booker’s book by Adam Mars-Jones in The Observer, Sunday, November 21, 2004. It’s almost as delicious as Emily’s conversation with Father Cassidy.

Christopher Booker’s hefty tome of cultural archaeology is peculiar, repetitive, near-barmy, and occasionally rather good. He takes the commonplace idea that there are only so many stories in the world and follows it very far indeed. Obsession is almost too small a word to describe an enterprise which has consumed 34 years and required a reading list more or less synonymous with the history of literature.

Hmm, I wonder if Mr. Booker blogs.

Even though these ways of conceiving the basic plot are not identical, they are certainly interrelated. On a structural level, the writer is unlikely to break entirely new ground, at least without abandoning plot altogether. Our plots can’t possibly be original. And that explains what’s wrong with all those benighted friends and strangers who tell us they have a marvelous idea for a book and they bet we’d love to write it. The knack of telling a good story is not the plot itself. It’s in how we tell the story: how we paint the scene and how we populate it, what our characters get up to and what they say in the course of meeting and murdering each other, pursuing the quest, solving the crime, and so on.

After a recent panel, a young man came up to me and expressed concern because the brief description of Death Will Get You Sober on my promotional bookmark resembled the novel he’s working on: his protagonist is a drug addict who goes into treatment, somebody is murdered, etc. (Now where does “Boy gets clean and sober” fit in? The hero’s quest? Man vs self? Coming of age—belatedly?) As I assured him, neither of us need worry. I don’t need to read his work to know he can’t possibly write just like me.

.

The Gift of "Oops!"

Elizabeth Zelvin

As a lifelong writer and a psychotherapist with many years experience, I found the perfect way to practice my profession a number of years ago: “seeing” clients online via chat and email on my website at LZcybershrink.com. One thing led to another, and I found myself a member of several online communities of mental health professionals from around the world. My home-based career allowed me time to write the murder mystery I had been carrying around in my head for quite a while. Once I had completed the first draft of Death Will Get You Sober, I discovered the online communities of writers and mystery lovers who would help me hone my craft and market my manuscript. By the time I got an offer from a publisher, I knew the Internet would be crucial to my efforts to promote my book—essential to my dream of continuing to write and publish further books in the series.

So now I’m blogging with Poe’s Deadly Daughters, accumulating Friends on MySpace, hanging out on CrimeSpace, launching my second website, elizabethzelvin.com—and still treating clients by chat and email, IMing with potential clients on LZcybershrink.com, training other clinicians in online practice skills in my group chat room, sharing cases with colleagues in a message board format, and gabbing away on e-lists with my mental health peers as well as the mystery communities of Sisters in Crime, Guppies, Mystery Writers of America, DorothyL, and Murder Must Advertise.

In short, I talk to an awful lot of people every day from the comfort of my seat at the keyboard. Sometimes I even multitask. So with all this cybercommunication going on, how do I keep from putting my virtual foot in my mouth? Without claiming a perfect record, I do pretty well thanks to a couple of features of texting: one, the time delay that allows me to delete before sending if I think better of what I’ve just typed; and two, the magic word “Oops!”

As a therapist, I am committed to the principle that it’s okay to make a mistake. It’s one of the tenets of emotional health. As a neurotic like everybody else, I’m embarrassed and mad at myself when I goof in any way. And as one of many who struggle with codependency, I’m devastated when I say the wrong thing. I hate to hurt anybody’s feelings. Nor do I enjoy having anyone mad at me. In real life, when we say something hasty or tactless, we don’t always get a chance to backpedal or apologize. But on the Internet, the adolescent geniuses who I assume (correct me if I’m wrong) dreamed up the smileys and emoticons, acronyms and buzz words that we use online have handed us a simple way to take back what we wish we hadn’t said.

Take the classic gaffe of inadvertently putting the letter in the wrong envelope: the guy who mails his boss the kvetching meant for a sympathetic buddy, the woman who sends her husband the steamy missive meant for a lover. Once the damage is done, the situation might be hard to retrieve. But if I send an email thanking the agent who’s rejected me for requesting the full manuscript—or get my time zones mixed up and schedule an appointment for a client’s 3:00 AM—it’s simply mended: I send a follow-up email with “Oops!” as the subject line. In fact, if I catch my error immediately, they may see it and know it’s a mistake before they even read the first email. The body of the “Oops!” email, of course, corrects the error and apologizes or explains as needed.

I imagine almost everyone has experienced a situation in which the ability to say “Oops!” saved the day. Or am I the only one? If so—oops!

Alone and Together with the Creative Process

Elizabeth Zelvin

I write alone. When I’m at the computer, I enter a world in which any interruption is an intrusion. If I have a door to close, I’ll close it. When I had a day job in which I had to write and also interact with clients and staff, this became a problem. The appropriate message to send these people was: “My door is always open.” But if my door was open, I couldn’t concentrate. Short term solution: I closed the door after sticking up a sign that said: “My door is figuratively open.” Long term solution: I quit the day job.

The logistics of writing are a little more complicated for me these days. I have two wonderful work spaces, but no doors. In my apartment in the city, there’s what could be called a computer corner in the living room. Tucked away behind the desktop, I’m practically invisible. It’s usually okay when my husband passes through. Occasionally he forgets and tries to start a conversation while I’m deep in my manuscript. But he’s very good about going away if I hold up a “Stop!” palm like a traffic cop. And his day job gives me plenty of alone time five days a week.

In the country, a little house on the East End of Long Island, my computer is also set up in the living room. But rather than looking into the room, I look over the top of my laptop monitor into the garden. The view includes constant activity at the bird feeders, my wonderful flowers—more glorious than ever since I got a deer fence for my last birthday—and wildlife that includes rabbits (loved or hated depending on what they’re nibbling on) and some very smart squirrels (though not smart enough to beat the baffles on the bird feeders). Once in a while I even get a fox, a possum, an owl, or a hawk. The key to solitude here is that my husband is a city boy who hates the country. (I had great fun giving this trait to one of my characters in a future book.) He’s relieved when I say, “It’s okay if you don’t come out this weekend. I’m writing.”

At a friend’s book launch recently, I heard the best answer yet to why—or how the hell—some writers write at Starbucks. She said, “At home, the phone rings, people try to talk to me, the mail comes—there are always distractions. At Starbucks, no one bothers me. I’m surrounded by all that wonderful energy, yet I can plunge into my own little world.” I guess the world is divided into two kinds of writers, those who talk about wonderful energy and those who say, “Leave me alone!” (This particular friend comes from Kansas and writes upbeat spiritual self-help books. I come from Queens and write murders. Hmmm.)

The middle ground between solitary writing and writing in a crowd is collaboration. I’ve heard quite a few mystery writing teams talk about writing together—PJ Parrish, Maan Meyers, Charles Todd, Evelyn David—and I’m always impressed. The chemistry of successful collaboration is a gift and a mystery, a lot like falling in love. On the other hand, I have seen that chemistry created in lab conditions, not as a fiction writer or poet (does anybody ever collaborate on a poem?), but as a songwriter. I’ve attended several workshops with legendary singer/songwriter Jimmie Dale Gilmore, who believes that the collaborative process both stimulates and mimics the internal creative process. As he memorably put it once, the voices that say, “Wow, that’s brilliant!” and “No, that’s stupid!” can come from the group or the inside of your head. In his workshops, he proves it by throwing together groups of four or five total strangers on Monday and asking them to write a song that’s ready to perform by Thursday. Talk about a creative challenge! But it works, though not without some acrimony and occasional tears. After going through that process five times, I appreciate the inside of my head.