Dude!

I was in the spa at my health club yesterday when I overheard the following conversation:
"You can use all kinds of weapons--sword, hatchet, whatever and I just grabbed the guy and ripped his arm off."
"Dude!"
"It's like Gears of War 3 only more violent. Blood everywhere."
"Dude!"
And in the middle guess who shows up? Chaos!"
"No way!"
"Way!"
"Dude!"

Several things were interesting about this exchange. The first was that these were not kids. They were men, at least in their twenties. It took me a couple of sentences to realize that they were talking about a video game, and then my next reaction was that this was more real to them than real life.

We talk about growing violence in our society, about young men seeing life as cheap and yet we have men like this who are living vicariously by killing other creatures on screen. No wonder it's easy to pull a trigger in real life when someone pisses us off.

Another woman was sitting in the hot tub and she and I exchanged amused glances. As she left she murmured to me. "Three words. Get a life."

As I left I found myself thinking 'thank heavens I write historical novels.' First my characters express themselves in complete sentences. They have large vocabularies. They are careful not to mention distasteful subjects and in the case of my Royal Spyness novels all the young men would have fought in World War 1. They would have experienced the real horrors of war and would never want to play a violent video game--trust me.

Down Time

I've got good news to report: My Agatha teapot arrived safely:

Something to cheer me up while I'm stuck most of the day in a chair, recuperating and trying to write.

I don’t know about other writers but I need plenty of down time to be able to write well. I think that writing a novel is like a pregnancy—the baby has to progress at it’s own rate and cannot be rushed. Wouldn’t it have been nice to say “I think I’ll have this baby in nine weeks instead of nine months “ and pushed the accelerator button. But would the baby have come out as perfectly formed, with all organs working?

Such is the way with novels. They have to develop at their own pace and I need plenty of down time to allow the next scenes to develop in my sub conscious. I always notice when we have guests or life intervenes with outside appointments that my writing suffers. It doesn’t leap ahead eagerly but crawls out, word by painful word.

And there are certain things I need most to let the creative juices flow: a nice long shower is one of them. The other is driving alone in the car. I’ve used trips to the library or grocery store to talk my way through complicated scenes. In the past people used to look at me warily as I shouted at myself in the car. But now, thanks to Bluetooth, I can shout away and be considered normal.

            At the moment I have more down-time than I want, stuck in my chair staring out of the window. I wish we lived on the sort of street where intrigue might happen in a rear window opposite, but alas it’s quiet and the neighbors are too far away to watch without binoculars. So what am I doing instead, to inspire creativity? Popping. Yes, popping. I’ve been given boxes of candy, and sent presents that come with bubble wrap. Do you know how soothing and fun it is to sit popping bubble wrap with nobody telling me to shut up? So popping is my new creativity exercise. You might want to try it sometime.

Ten Mistakes that New Writers Make.

I've had to read several books by new authors recently and I've found that there are newbie mistakes that make me want to put the book down in the first chapter.

So I thought I'd share Rhys's Ten No-nos for opening chapters:

1. Don't introduce too many characters at once. We can't take in too many names and descriptions.

2.  Don't give characters similar sounding names. If there is a Joan and a Jean in the room, I'll get them mixed up. If possible don't have names starting with the same letter.

3: Don't feel a need to describe everyone in the scene. It gets boring and overwhelming if we are told that a tall, distinguished gray haired man is talking to a short, red-headed, pudgy man. If the description is important then give us the sentence. If age and relationship don't come out through dialog, then do mention them. I like to know that Sarah is Isobel's mother and not her friend. But this can be done so easily through dialog. "Really, Mother, you're always criticizing."

4;Set the scene well so that we know where we are

5. Make it clear who is speaking, especially at the beginning of a book before we are familiar with the characters.

6: Make sure something happens in the first chapter. I don't mean that we need a dead body sprawled in the first paragraph but the reader has to have a reason to keep reading. I was once given an unpublished book in which the protagonist arrives at his mother's house, chats, has tea, goes to play tennis with her, in the midst of which she says "By the way dear, someone has kidnapped your father." Needless to say this book was never published!

7. Don't interrupt action to give us backstory. If there are things about the character's past that we need to know you can slip in a tantalizing line if you have to but save the details for later. It's more exciting that way.

8. Don't interrupt action to give us a personal description. Someone chasing a kidnapper is not likely to stop, look in a mirror and notice that her face was oval shaped.

9. Don't feel that you have to tell us everything right away. Think of a real life party. You meet someone... you get a first impression of them. They may reveal a fact or two about themself. You may overhear someone saying, "Such a pity about Sylvia." And you are intrigued. You may not find out about Sylvia until much later.

10: Don't start with "It was a dark and stormy night."  Unless the weather is going to play a major role in your story find another way to start the book. Readers today are impatient. They need to be hooked right away, so work extra hard on that first paragraph.

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?