Getting it wrong.

Remember I just posted about how, based on my current experience of broken pelvis and sitting in a wheelchair, Matthew couldn't have suddenly stood up and gone to Lavinia in Downton Abbey last season? Well, I've thinking about books I've read where the author gets something wrong and the effect it has on me.

I normally adore Connie Willis but in her book Blackout the landlady during the Blitz tells her that it costs 5p to use the telephone. That ended the book as far as I was concerned. The decimal currency with 5 new pence didn't come into being until 25 years after the war. The telephone would have cost tuppence, or two old pennies. I hated this mistake because it ripped me out of the period. And if you know the author has got one thing wrong, then you distrust the rest of the story.

I remember reading an early Martha Grimes in which she made two unforgivable howlers. She had someone go to the shops on Boxing Day...and until recently not a single store in England would be open the day after Christmas. It was the commercial holiday when tradespeople and servants got their day off. Now, of course, everyone wants to make maximum profit and stores stay open all the time. Pity.
The other howler was that she had some countrywoman warn that someone might "nail a skunk to her front door."  Sorry, but there has never been a skunk in the British isles.

Mistakes like this make me stop reading a book and never trust the writer again. I always worry in my own books that I'll get something horrible wrong. The only awful thing I think I've done so far is to put Claridges on the wrong street. This is unforgivable as my parents used to live next door to the night manager at Claridges and I've been there many times. So that revealed to me that the danger is in what we think we know and thus don't bother to double check. These days I write the Royal Spyness books with the 1930s A to Z maps of London beside me!

And on the recovery front--I'm gradually progressing and the house is turning into a blooming wonder! Thanks for all your good wishes!

Where do I Go From Here?

I'm about to start a new book and as usual I'm in full panic mode. If I were a sensible author I'd start with the outline, plot out every scene and then feel confident that I could deliver a sound, enjoyable story. But I can't work this way. I wish I could, but I can't. If I wrote an outline I'd immediately lose interest in the story. And frankly I work best with the element of surprise. I start off knowing very little--usually a setting. For example: how about if I send Molly Murphy to one of the "cottages" in Newport R.I or how about if Georgie goes to winter on the Riviera with the wealthy Brits.
And then I start, plunging blindly ahead until she meets someone--in Naughty in Nice it's an encounter with a handsome Frenchman on the boat and then Coco Chanel on the train, and then the whole future of the story hangs on these encounters.
In the upcoming Hush Now, Don't You Cry--the next Molly Murphy book, due out in March, it is the character of the house and the family that owns it that creates the story--much more a story created through atmosphere than many of the Molly books. I also had to make sure that Molly, now married, still has a good reason to be a sleuth.

So the first 100 pages are, as I said, full panic mode. I'm taking baby steps, not quite knowing where plot twists might lead. And then I find a body, a character I didn't expect shows up and things liven up. I begin to see where we're going and the whole thing picks up steam. By page 200 I'm charging along, enjoying myself.
This is probably a stupid way to work, but it works for me. You see, I don't really know where my heroine is going. I'm following her, just watching and waiting, and thus I'm as surprised as she is when something happens to her. I'm not the puppet master, pushing her into a situation and I think this makes it more fun for the reader too.
In every book I've been surprised at what my heroine does, what she uncovers, whom she meets. Plots always go in directions I haven't expected, and remarkably, after 27 mystery novels, they all seem to come to a satisfying conclusion and there has never yet been a story where I've gotten myelf horribly stuck or written myself into a corner.

So now I start Molly book 12. And what do I know? Molly is pregnant and someone in New York is kidnapping babies. Sounds good, huh? I think there must be a good story there, waiting to be uncovered.  More about my methods in a couple of days.

Who am I writing for?

I'm about to start thinking about a new Molly Murphy mystery and also to come up proposals for the next three Lady Georgie books and I realize this is becoming harder than it was before. Not because I'm running out of ideas--far from it. I keep coming up with fun little twists and interesting plotlines for both series. The problem is that I am now so engaged in social media that I am in constant contact with several thousand fans. And they tell me what they like. I heard a lot of griping because Darcy did not figure prominently in Naughty in Nice. Of course there was the dashing and sexy Jean Paul de Ronchard instead but for keen fans of the series it just wasn't the same.

When I started writing mysteries I literally wrote for myself. I didn't think what might sell, what might make the NYT bestseller list or what might win an award. I knew what story I wanted to read and I couldn't find it on the shelf, so I wrote it. Now I feel all kinds of pressures--good reviews, bestseller lists, and above all pleasing my readers. It's got to be fun and sexy and dramatic and a good story but most readers want the story to be a personal one for Molly and Georgie. They want romance and heartbreak. They want their emotions involved.

This is now mmore of a challenge with the next Molly book because if you read Bless the Bride you'd know that Molly is now married. No more of that lovely romantic tension or the will they, won't they. So I have to think long and hard about where I want to go with that series. Children of her own to worry about, I'm sure. Daniel in danger. Cases that involve her personal life. So.... any suggestions as to what you'd want Molly to do next?

This raises an interesting point: should a writer keep her readership in mind when she writes, especially in a popular series. If the publishers had their way, we'd write the same book, over and over. Find a popular concept and stick with it. Look at Patricia Cornwell--that's exactly what she's done. Until now I've gone where I want to with my heroines, tried new things (like Molly meeting Houdini) and different tones for the books. But now I'm increasingly aware that my readers expect a certain kind of book when they see my name. Added pressure to perform and to please.

So, dear readers, what do you think? Should a writer write to please her readers? Should a series be consistent in tone and darkness so that the reader knows what to expect?  Do you get bored and lose interest if the stories are too similar or annoyed if they are too different? I guess I'm trying to please everyone and in the end the only person I can please is myself.

Teach Me How to Write.

I'm just getting back my life after the Book Passage Mystery Writing Conference that takes place every summer at my fabulous local bookstore Book Passage in Corte Madera, CA.

It's always an intensive three days of workshops, lectures and private consultations during which around 80 hopeful mystery writers want to find the magic bean that will turn them into published authors. The success rate for this conference is rather impressive: Sheldon Siegel, Cara Black , Cornelia Read,Tony Broadbent, Tim Maleeny are a few of the graduates who not only made it to print but have won awards for their writing.

But every year I come away with ambivolent thoughts. Can anybody really be taught to write?

Some of the attendees I see clearly have the spark and all they need is some suggestion on pacing or focus or plot development. For others no amount of writing classes will ever make them a published author. It's rather like me and painting. I love to paint. I can create a pretty good picture if I copy reality or somebody shows me what to do, but my painting instructor can look at a scene, give a few magic flourishes with her brush and suddenly there it is in living color with an whole new twist to it.

Every year I am asked what writing courses I took before I started out. The answer, none. I taught myself to be a writer by writing. As a small child I lived in a world of pretend. I played the part of princess, good fairy, girl lost in the woods, even queen of my own country. Later I wrote down stories with myself as heroine. I wrote movie scripts I wanted to star in. And during my professional writing career I have usually written a book that I want to read but is not already on the shelf.

What I see at conferences is that everybody probably has one book in them--everyone's life has one riveting moment that makes a good story. But not everybody has the ability to leap from their own life into someone else's world. And certainly not everybody has the ability to tell a story so that it comes alive, so that we ask, "And what happens next?"

So are writing classes a waste of time?  I think they can be beneficial, especially for the writer who needs feedback and positive reinforcement as they work. It's hard writing into a vacuum and the writer needs to know that he or she is heading in the right direction. It's also useful to hone skills, find flaws. But to say to someone else, "This is how you create a character" is something I find difficult. I've never created a character. I think of a story I'd like to tackle and a character appears saying "Hello, here I am."  It's all an extention of that pretending world I lived in when I was four.

So my one piece of advice that I've given several times this weekend--if you want to be a writer WRITE. Learn to use words as a potter learns to use clay. Practice putting words down on a page. Learn to develop a plot over 300 pages, to describe people and places so that we know them and we are there. And unfortunately the only clear mantra for success is to write the book that nobody has written before.

What are your experience of writing classes? Good? Bad? Do they help?

Empty Nesting

Celebrate with me, please. Yesterday I printed out my next Molly book, tentatively called Hush Now, Don't You Cry. Now it goes to several readers whose opinions I trust and value. When they've given me their imput, I do one giant rewrite and then off it goes to the publisher.

 

You'd think I'd heave a sigh of relief every time I get through a book, wouldn't you? In a way I do. But that usually comes around page 200 when I know that I can see the climax of the story and how it will end. Actually what I feel when I send a book off is the same feeling as when a child goes off to college. It has gone. Whatever happens to it now is out of my hands. And with this a profound feeling of emptiness. This book consumes my life for at least three months. I write daily. I wake and think about it in the middle of the night. And now, suddenly, I don't have to get up, go to the computer and write any more. So the question looms--what am I going to do with myself until I have to start another book? Clean house? Weed garden? Shop for new toothpaste? Strangely nothing seems to have appeal, and it's worrying because I am already of an age when my friends have retired or are thinking about retirement. I simply can't visualize not writing.

Friends shake their heads in astonishment and ask where I get my energy when I tell them I'm about to zoom off around the country again--to Ann Arbor, Bethesda, Annapolis and Pittsburgh next weekend. And it's true that these trips are tiring. But I love the interaction with fans. (and actually I secretly enjoy it when a limo is waiting for me, which happens sometimes).

So I guess the answer is that I'm going to keep on writing as long as I can sit at a computer. If I'm one of those lucky enough to still have contracts with major publishers, I'm going to make the most of it. Who needs retirement, anyway?

And a blessed Easter or Passover to you all!

And Now, My Pretty....

Over at Jungle Red Writers (http://www.jungleredwriters.com/) I've just blogged about those improbable plot twists that can really turn us off from a story--the girl who goes down to the basement in the storm, with the serial killer in the neighborhood... you know the kind of thing. So hop over and add your comments.