Let me tell you a story.

A devoted father takes his four children out for a pontoon boat cruise on one of Florida’s wild and scenic rivers. The oldest son is nearly twelve. The youngest is only 18 months.

The trip is lovely, but somewhat uneventful, so he lets the oldest pilot the boat. Then the father, who grew up with Florida wildlife, sees a large alligator near the riverbank, which is dense with foliage and Spanish moss hanging from ancient trees. He tells the oldest son to cut the engine and drift toward the bank so they can get a closer look at the gator.

All’s well and good until they near the bank and the lone daughter yells “hornet’s nest” and points to a tree, directly in the path of the pontoon boat’s canopy. The canopy and the nest are destined to collide in seconds.

The father is faced with a terrible decision. In the water somewhere nearby is a twelve foot alligator. Seconds away in an inevitable collision with a basketball sized hornet’s nest, visually swarming with life. What should he do to protect his children? Should they jump into the water to escape the inevitable attack by the hornets, or should they stay in the boat to avoid the alligator?

What would you do? (more…)

I am an unabashed fan of Les Miserables, the show and the movie. I suspect I would like the book, as well, although having picked it up at Books-A-Million yesterday, I realized I would need a camel caravan to carry it home. But Les Mis (and The Christmas Carol) are productions I never miss in any form.

Why those two? That’s another blog.

Recently I had the treat of seeing both the movie and the touring company of Les Mis within the same month. While neither were perfect, both were outstanding in their own ways. I found myself distracted, though, by the overdramatization of the stage version. Hence, the subject of melodrama vs. plain old-fashioned drama.

Dictionary.com defines melodrama as: A dramatic form that does not observe the laws of cause and effect and that exaggerates emotion and emphasizes plot or action at the expense of characterization.

Just as written the musical Les Mis borders on melodrama. Fantine’s fall from grace into prostitution, Jean Valjean’s heroic attempts to become a better man, the barricades where the best and brightest give their lives for very little. These are huge, sweeping events, and in any audience at any time you will hear the zippers and clasps of handbags as women rummage for tissues for themselves and their male companions. The music is so stirring, the melodies so easy to hum, the staging is so . . .

And that’s where the distractions occurred for me.

Let’s clear the air first. Melodrama is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is what it is. Melodrama is like cotton candy. It’s so wonderful going down, but in the end, if it weren’t for sticky fingers, you wouldn’t be sure you really ate it. There’s nothing left, not even a lingering taste on the tongue.

Compare that with chocolate mousse? (more…)

Unless you’re new here, you already know my husband and I just moved to Happiness Key. . . okay, not “really” but close enough to suit me. We bought a House with a View in Florida, and will never regret it. We look over a narrow marshy waterway alive with birds and, I’m told, occasional bobcat and Florida panther sitings.  I’m not sure whether the person who told me the latter really had her facts straight, but she did tell me eagles fly by regularly, and she is absolutely right.

We are mesmerized by the beauty of it all, and after fighting with my better self for weeks, I moved my study into what was formerly the media room. I think writing at the window overlooking the marsh makes more sense than watching television with my back turned to it. Luckily my husband agrees.

Have you moved recently? Then you know that you arrive at your new home with your old furniture and ideas, and sometimes nothing from the past really fits. For us, this time that universal truth is more apparent than usual. The furniture that looked snug and homey in Ohio and Virginia now looks dated and out of place here. We’re finding ways to use some of our things, but some of it will have to go. Replacing it will be a slow process since every piece has memories attached, and I have to figure out what I can live without and what I can’t.  But the ending is inevitable. By the time a year has passed, this house will look very different.

Writers have to go through the same process, only sometimes we don’t catch on right away. We conceive a project, fall in love with characters, settings, plot points, then we “move in” and settle down to write the story or the book we imagined and yikes, something feels out of place. Instead of tossing whatever it is, though, too often we try to shoe horn it in, shoving it where it doesn’t want to go, where it’s uncomfortable and even dangerous to the health of our work in progress.

But we can’t let go.

Here are a few tips I’ve learned to help determine what should stay and what shouldn’t. They apply to moving and to writing.

1. Try your original concept. Move furniture or story points where you thought they should go and live with them a little while. Time is your friend.
2. When you’re ready, evaluate. Does something seem intrusive or out of place where it is? Does it need to be moved or removed? Try moving it first before you do something more drastic.
3. Change is easiest in increments. If rearranging didn’t help, try listing everything that doesn’t seem to fit. Then order the list from the easiest to the most difficult or painful to get rid of. If you really need to make a change, start with the easiest thing. Then evaluate again. Repeat if necessary after you’ve lived with the change for a little while.
4. Put furniture and ideas in temporary storage. If you’re not ready to get rid of something entirely, store it off site for a while. Are things better now? Or do you miss what you removed? If so, with a fresh perspective can you find a new place for it? If you watch  HGTV’s myriad  renovation shows, you’ll remember that decorators often remove an item from one room to place in another less likely room, where it looks smashing and revitalizes the decor. Can you do the same?
5. If you can’t find a place for something in your work in progress, can you pack it away it until you need it again? Or until you can give it to someone who will love it the way you did? I keep a “cuts” file on every book I write, the way some people use a storage locker. Instead of throwing out carefully crafted sentences or paragraphs that don’t belong, I move them into the cuts file. Sometimes they are beyond valuable in a different chapter. Sometimes they are exactly what I needed for the next book. Sometimes if the idea is a good one but not really my style, I pass it on to a friend. However, most of the time, it’s gone from my mind the moment I remove it.

Patience is the hardest part.  I want everything in my house or manuscript to be exactly right immediately.  But polishing takes time, and rushing through the process doesn’t help.  In the next months I’m going to step back and follow my own advice.  And while I’m figuring out what should go where in my new house, I’m going to enjoy my new view.  Nothing beats being relaxed and happy for generating solutions and fresh ideas.

And speaking of being relaxed and happy?  Enjoy the Thanksgiving holiday.  I know that I personally have a lot to be thankful for this year.  How about you?

While I’m waiting for my real life to resume and house-sitting for friends, I’ve been working on a novella.  A hundred pages is the perfect project for this interlude in my life.  Short, like my stay here, and easier to interrupt if I don’t finish the book before I move again.

The novella, tentatively titled Let It Snow, is the first of three in a Christmas anthology.  The stories are connected, and the coordination has been more work than the writing.  But my co-authors are lovely women, and we’ve managed to iron out details and have fun besides.

Let’s face it, normally I don’t write short.  Just don’t. I linger over characters’ lives, construct multiple subplots, and embellish settings.  I want my readers to feel they’re walking through the pages. I’ll confess that sometimes I take the long way home when I could detour successfully and get there days earlier.

So it’s odd that I also like to write novellas. Love to, in fact. And odder still, I’ve never gone over my word count. Since almost everything about writing one is a little different, today I’ll share a few things I’ve learned. If you’re planning to write a short book or even a short story, maybe these will help.

• Tell don’t show. Every novelist knows that showing, not telling, is the golden rule of fiction writing. Yet the shorter the novel, the more you must tell up front. What brought the character to this place. What the character is feeling. Of course you must avoid huge information dumps and reveal a bit at a time. But you are allowed to tell more and show less. Just be sure to show the really important scenes in detail. It’s a matter of figuring out where the emotion is, where the turning points are, where the major aspects of character development occur, then showing them. Just don’t show everything, or you will have written, ahem, a novel, not a novella.
• Choose a plot with emotion built in. Let It Snow is a lovers reunited story. My characters were once in love, but then they were separated by circumstance. Feelings run deep in a lovers reunited plot. The two main characters know each other well, but something caused them to part. So much has already happened before the book begins. And now you can tell, not show, what that was. Catch the reader up  quickly and move on. Lovers reunited is only one example. Choose a story that gets right to the emotion and the action, not one that requires a lengthy set-up.
• Think days, not years. Once you’ve established everything important that happened before the book opened, make the most of the days when your story takes place. These are the scenes you linger over.
• If you’re forced to use fewer words, choose them even more wisely. Every glance, every snippet of conversation, every description matters twice as much. Make every word count.

There’s nothing as gratifying as sitting down to a project you can complete in a matter of weeks or months.  It’s good for the ego, good for the soul.  Looking for a project?  Give a novella a try.

Watch Sherlock Season 2: Making a Modern Hound on PBS. See more from Masterpiece.

Last night I watched the newest Sherlock Holmes on P’BS Masterpiece Mystery, an updated version of  The Hound of the Baskervilles.  I love this series.  Sherlock and Watson are a fabulously dysfunctional pair, Sherlock clearly suffering from Aspergers and Watson recovering from PTSD.  The chemistry is terrific, both men sympathetic in their own ways. And the stories are multi-layered and scrumptious. (more…)

A warm welcome to Diane Chamberlain and many thanks for her willingness to share writing tips today.

I’ve interviewed Diane at Southern Exposure before, but today Diane has agreed to talk more specifically about the way she writes.  Her newest book
The Good Father just arrived at bookstores, so I thought it would be fun to ask her how that story grew and changed, and what she did to nudge it along.

I’ve been a writer nearly . . . well, never mind, but I’m still fascinated by the way that my colleagues work. As I’ve said here before, we’re all different. Translated that means: There is no right way to write a book, only the way that works best for each individual author. So let’s see what works for Diane.

Diane, I know you’ve been asked a million times where you find your ideas. Can you share where the specific idea for The Good Father originated?  

Nearly every morning, I take my work to a local coffee shop. One morning, a young guy came in with a little girl. They looked so out of place there and my imagination kicked into high gear. Was he her father? Could he have kidnapped her? And what if he asked me to watch her for a minute while he ran out to his car and never back? I had my story. At least I had the jumping off point. Unfortunately, that’s the easy part!

What’s the strangest way an idea occurred to you?

Well, before I got into working in coffee shops, I took my work to Taco Bell. One day, the two women sitting behind me were talking about a friend of theirs whose ex-husband was fighting for custody of their infant son. One of the women said “If that happened to me, I’d change my name and take my baby and move to another state.” I had my story. . . or half of my story. When I got home, I turned on my new laptop computer to jot down my thoughts. (more…)

This week, in addition to meeting my new grandson, I also met my new cover.  One of these I adored on sight.  (I’ll let you guess which.)  Sometimes that happens. 

The new cover is for the first book in a series, One Mountain Away, which debuts in August.  The series is titled Goddesses Anonymous.  This time, more than usual, I felt we needed to get the cover absolutely right.  In addition to a cover that the bookstore browser would pick up, we needed a “look” that made it clear to my readers that the next time they saw the same “look” it would be on the cover of the second book in the Goddesses Anonymous series.

While my publisher and I struggle together with the cover, I’m reminded of all the problems of setting up the actual story to lead into a series of novels.  So today, let’s explore the first thing you must pay attention to if the novel you’re writing could become the first of several–or a dozen. 

• Will there be recurring characters?  Who are they, and what will happen in their lives as the story progresses?  How central will they be in each book, and if they are central, have you left a number of loose threads in their lives to weave in as the series continues?

There are different kinds of series, of course.  Mystery series usually feature a detective (amateur sleuth, law enforcement professional, or private investigator) who solves a different crime in each novel.  His/her life changes slowly from book to book, but the personal is not usually the focus of the story.  The life of the sleuth enriches but doesn’t fuel each novel’s plot. 

In contrast series in general fiction can focus on a group of friends, a particular place, a theme, etc., and they can vary in interesting ways.  Sometimes each book features a different character, but prior characters walk on and off stage.  (My Shenandoah Album series is an example, as is the new Goddesses Anonymous series.)  Other series (Happiness Key) use the same main characters in an ensemble from book to book.  If you haven’t read Happiness Key, then think Desperate Housewives, of television fame.  Or Friends.

The kind of series you envision will affect how you use recurring characters.  Planning ahead is best, because if you don’t, you’ll find yourself working around all kinds of situations and background you set up in Book One without realizing that later you would be hemmed in by them.

Having said that, I’ll confess that neither the Shenandoah Album series nor the Happiness Key series were meant to be series at all.  They were stand alone novels.  Only when I’d finished did I realize how many questions I still had about the characters, and how much fun it would be to explore the answers.  I found plenty of loose ends and added more as I went.

I promise we’ll consider more items in another Write Way blog.  Meantime, for previous writing tips, click here, or on the Write Way category to your right.

For now, remember that characters matter most in a series.  Be sure you create characters your readers will want to read about from book to book.  Better yet, create characters they can’t wait to read about, and just as important, characters you can’t wait to write about.  Over and over and over again.

Picture this:  You’ve splurged on a hefty hardcover you know you’ll spend weeks reading.  You’ve given the bookstore your hard-earned cash because you expect the author to keep his/her unspoken promise.  Within these pages a story will unfold,one so riveting that by the time you finish, your life  will be transformed–or at least during the hours you and the book kept company.

Instead, the author chooses to begin well before important action takes place, and the first one hundred pages are simply a family or character history.  You feel cheated, almost as if you have to pass a test to get to the good part.

Remember “Do-Re-Mi” from the Sound of Music?  Julie Andrews assures us: “Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.”  Maybe that’s true when you’re learning how to sing, but not so much when you’re writing a novel.

Last Friday I defined back story as “all those things that happened before the book begins.”  I speculated there are three instances when including back story might be important.

1. To explain vital parts of a character’s personality
2. To explain motivation for actions in the front story (the story that’s unfolding in the present.)
3. To set up important plot points

Deciding what back story to include is only half the writing battle.  The other half is how to include it.

Flashbacks are probably the most common way.  A flashback can be this simple:

“He remembered another night when she had worn this dress.  She’d come downstairs, long legs appearing first, then the ruffled hem, then the nipped-in waist.  That had been the best part of the evening, because as usual, a fight had begun before they walked out the front door.”

Flashbacks can also be lengthy.  Instead of a character’s thoughts, we “relive” the past as if it were happening again.  The author uses a transition to take us into the past and suddenly the characters are younger, and the reader is revisiting a moment in a character’s life that will provide that reader with new insights and understanding.  Diane Chamberlain uses this to great effect in her novel The Midwife’s Confession, using entire chapters of flashback so skillfully, we don’t feel disoriented.

Another oft-employed method is to use written material such as a journal or letters.  I used this device in Whiskey Island and again in The Parting Glass, the sequel.  Whiskey Island begins with a journal entry from a priest in 1880, a journal which is discovered later in the novel and vital for explaining an incident that still affects the present day characters.  

For The Parting Glass I used letters written by the same priest’s sister.  Quite honestly they were less effective than the journal.  I included the letters to connect the style of the two books, but their content wasn’t as important, and the way they were mistakenly set into the book was confusing.

See, I never said this was easy.

Dreams are another possibility, but usually not a good one.  Ever watch someone’s eyes glaze when you tell them about a dream from the night before?  Enough said. 

Sandwiching the book between a prologue and epilogue in the present is another method, which in the hands of a master, can be powerful, but is most often annoying. Who are these people and why do we care?

A story within the story is another way to show back story.  I used this device in Fox River by including a “novel” the heroine’s mother was writing.  At first the ”extra” novel seems like nothing more than an interesting historical diversion, a chance for me to show off what I’d learned about fox hunting.  By the end of the book, the reader realizes Maisy’s novel is anything but a diversion.  I hate to say more.  I want you to read it.

So many decisions, so many good ways and not-so-good ways to accomplish a task.  Welcome to the world of a novelist.  Remember, if you’re not sure something you’re doing is working, try a different method and compare.  Still not happy?  Try yet another.  Your job is to write the best book you can, and sometimes trial and error is the only way to make sure you do. 

This week was a milestone in my career.  I turned in One Mountain Away, which is the first in the Goddesses Anonymous series set in Asheville, North Carolina.   Wherever you live, I’m sure you heard the cheers.

One Mountain Away is scheduled to come out in August of 2012, and while I’ve yet to see a cover, I hope my publisher will use some of the area’s gorgeous scenery, a sample of which you see here, photographed by my favorite photographer (and son) Galen McGee of Peak Definition, in Asheville.

Some books are easier to write than others.  How easy, how hard, never seem to make a difference in the way the book is viewed by readers or reviewers.  Some of the hardest books look effortless.  Nobody engrossed in the novel knows how much the author agonized over the best way to portray a character or present the central conflict.  Other books, which look difficult on the surface, may not have been.  Quite possibly the author went into the book certain she knew exactly what she wanted to say and how she wanted to say it.  And while it’s unlikely the author never deviated, it does happen.  Some books just seem to be channeled from above, counterweights to the ones that are eked from the earth below, one miserable word at a time.

One Mountain Away was one of the latter.  I knew so much about the story up front.  I understood characters, motivation, story arc, setting and how it played into my chapters.  I knew what I wanted to tackle and what I wanted to stay away from.   I was missing some crucial bits, though.  The hardest decision was the best way to incorporate back story.

Back story refers to all those things that happened before the reader opened the book.  It’s the novelist’s job to decide what’s important for the reader to know and what isn’t.  Next Friday I’ll tackle ways to include back story.  But the first order of business is deciding if the information is necessary in the first place.

Sometimes back story’s clearly superfluous.  Let’s say a woman mistakenly receives a letter meant for a stranger.  She opens it and learns something interesting that she begins to investigate.  What do we need to know about her?  Very little.  Who she was before the story began is relatively unimportant.  The letter has nothing to do with her previous life.  Maybe there’s a subplot that needs a touch of back story, an ex-boyfriend trying to win her back, a job she hates, but that’s easily explained in a sentence or two before the book moves forward.

But what if back story connects in some important way to the story at hand?  If her investigations take her back to her own past, say she’s investigating a hit and run accident; the driver was under the influence, and she comes from a family with substance abuse problems, then yes, her past could be important.  The past might provide motivation to investigate.  Or the case at hand might finally help her deal with her own past.

Or what if she believes the letter was meant for a stranger, only that isn’t really true? What if the letter’s part of a scheme to involve her in the present situation because of something she’s done?

Including back story without annoying the reader who yearns to move forward, is difficult, so it has to be important.  My rule of thumb?   If back story is needed to explain vital aspects of a character’s personality (fears, actions, loves, hates, etc.) then include what you must.  If back story enlightens the reader about motivation, include.  If back story sets up important plot points?  Include.

Don’t include back story simply because it’s interesting or dramatic.  A pinch here and there, perhaps, as it pertains to the story at hand, but that’s all.  No matter how interesting you’ve made it for your own purposes, if back story isn’t completely relevant to the present story, it’s distracting. 

If you must tell that story, the one I’m advising you not to include, why not simply make the back story your novel?  After all, maybe that’s the story you’ve yearned to tell all along.

Okay, who remembers Tom Paxton?  Remember his song Daily News?  “Daily news, daily blues, pick up a copy every time you choose.  Seven little pennies in the newsboy’s hand. . .“  Seven little pennies?  Newsboy?  How old is this song, anyway?

Apparently it’s this old: “Civil rights leaders are a pain in the neck, can’t hold a candle to Chiang Kai-shek.”  Ask your children or grandchildren who Chiang Kai-shek was and gauge accordingly.  Or for a real eye-opener, ask them about civil rights.

Vintage or not, I find myself humming Daily News sometimes when I see an article or headline in the newspaper that sounds like an idea for a book.  While I have access to many newspapers online, my book ideas usually come from the Washington Post, which is delivered straight to my sidewalk.  For this purpose a newspaper in the hand is worth two on the iPad.  It’s the little articles, the ones you’d never notice online or that wouldn’t even make it there, that often have the best story ideas hidden inside.  Local crimes and gossip.  Obituaries.  Letters to the editor. Advice columns–always good for romances and family drama. (more…)