Column A

After Beth Groundwater's wonderful post yesterday, I give you a short, simple, writerly tip of the day:

What goes in Column A comes out in Column B.

Several years ago I was cramming to meet a deadline. I had been holed up in my attic writing lair for about three weeks solid when a social obligation arrived out of which I could not wiggle:a long planned dinner with friends. Oddly, they called my significant other the night before and told us to wear sweats. They said they had a surprise.

Oka-a-a-ay. I know these folks, I'm not worried. Maybe a little. But we wore sweats. When we arrived, they served wine, light appetizers and bottled water, and in the other room they had booked a masterful masseuse (pardon my alliteration), and we each took turns for a forty-five minute session. The outcome was that I turned to jelly, went home invigorated, and wrote like the wind for the next two weeks. I finished my deadline on time, and I believe my writing (Column B) improved greatly from stepping away for that massage evening with my friends (Column A).

From The Writer's Life, Insights from The Right to Write by Julia Cameron: One of the mysteries of the writing life is the fact that an investment of interest in column A—say listening to a great piece of music—will pay off obliquely when we set pen to paper on an entirely different topic. Writing is what we make from the broth of our experience. If we lead a rich and varied life, we will have a rich and varied stock of ingredients from which to draw on. If we lead a life that is too narrow, too focused, too oriented toward our goals, we will find our writing lacks flavor, is thin on the nutrients that make it both savory and sustaining. Although we tend to think of it as a linear, writing is a profoundly visual art. Even if we are writing about internal experience, we use images to do it. For this reason, we must consciously and constantly restock our store of images. We do this by focusing on what is around us.

If you are blocked or frustrated today take a minute or twenty for yourself to take a walk, look around. Shut your eyes and listen to music from the viewpoint of one of your characters. Leaf through a magazine and clip items that remind you of your story and your characters. Go to the dollar store and buy one item representative of your protagonist, another representative of your antagonist. Put them on your desk or carry them in your pocket as talismans. Or, get a massage!

Happy writing.

Susan Goodwill

author of The Kate London Mystery Series

Brigadoom:2007

Little Shop of Murders: 2008

Inspiration

They say the first step to changing a bad behavior is facing it, admitting it. So, here's my confession: Hello, my name is Susan, and it has been one year since I have written anything significant.
I've talked about it and diddled around with maybe 100 words at a pop. This has gone on for at least the last twelve months. Okay, fourteen.

Most of the folks on this blog sneeze and a hundred words hit the paper. But for some reason, this past year and this book and this all-or-nothing personality of mine have conspired to create a wee bit of some kind of er, ummm…, BLOCK!
There, I said it. And I do NOT believe in writers' block.

Here's the thing: I want to write. I plan to write. It's what I feel I'm on this planet to do. Honest. But every day, I don’t. I can make enough excuses to fill a dozen blogs, let alone this one. The truth is, I've procrastinated because writing is hard, and it doesn’t pay well at this point in my career. The odds are that it will never pay well.

The pay well part is important because I am largely motivated by financial recognition and furthermore, I like to eat.

But here's what happened. The receptionist at my doctor's office left me a voicemail last night. She had just finished my second book, Little Shop of Murders. After the various and sundry appointment information, she launched into a gushing riff on how much she loved Little Shop.

This morning I called to change my appointment. She called my book the best book she'd read in a long time. She proceeded to say that she stayed up until 4:00 AM finishing it. She said that what she loves about my books is that they are funny with a good mystery, but that there is something about them that is just a tiny bit sad underneath. No one else has gotten that yet, but I meant for it to be gotten.

And she asked that I put her first on the list for the next book.

I am bottling that phonecall and putting it on a shelf in the writers' room in my head. I'll take a sip every day and use it to inspire me to get back on track. 2009 will bring another book. I swear.

Anyway, eating is overrated.

So, what keeps you guys going?

Plot, Place, Character?

In searching for a subject for this morning's blog post, I was glancing through Speaking of Murder—Interviews with Masters of Mystery and Suspense published by Berkley Prime Crime, way back in 1998. I stumbled upon an interview with Elizabeth George where she speaks about her deep "psychic" connection to England. She goes on to say how she starts with the merest kernel of a plot then spends about a week at the location of choice (a spot in the U.K.) to allow the seed to germinate. She often goes back later, as the story develops, to soak up more of the region.

She particularly likes writing about a foreign country because she notices every detail. She goes on to say that when writing about U.S. locations, she doesn’t pick up the same info on her radar. The nuances of every day life, like the type of raincoat a person wears, the food one orders, the newspapers one reads, all are so familiar, the tiny things get lost in the shuffle.

So this started me thinking, how much do you think a sense of place has to do with your story?

I know that most of the authors that post regularly on this blog write series mysteries, so the question of place is often answered in advance. Not always, though. And sometimes, just like similar plots or the same core characters go stale without a new twist, a writer needs to shake things up a bit with their sense of place.

I believe this is why, as a series goes on, we often see characters from a small town take a trip. You see it all the time on TV.

Lucy and Ricky and Ethel and Fred loaded up the car and went to Hollywood. Later in the series, they even bought a country inn. And then, look at "Murder She Wrote." Cabot Cove having beaten out Detroit and Washington, D.C. as the town with the most killings per capita, Jessica Fletcher split for greener (or more bloody) pastures just about every week. But, I think it's safe to say, by that point in the series, the sense of place established by the series traveled with her. Maine in that big black purse, ah-yup.

And take a look at the CSI TV shows, talk about a sense of place! NY, Las Vegas, and Nevada, ne'er the twain shall meet. (Except that one time when Horatio flew to N.Y. He seemed so lost without his shades, but don't get me started!)

When Midnight Ink first considered my book, BrigaDOOM, they asked if I would move the Kate London Mystery Series from the western Michigan coast to Cleveland. Cleveland??

After I finished gasping and got up off the floor, I took a deep breath and explained how inextricably linked a small, blighted town on Lake Michigan's shore was to the characters' sense of self, the stories, and the series in general. The frustrations of an 'almost tourist town' that is unique to that part of Michigan, the feeling of a peninsula, the shortest of summer seasons, the dunes, so many things would change or be lost. I grew up not far from Cleveland, and a person not from Michigan might argue that they are close enough, take it from me, they're not.

Midnight Ink, thankfully, agreed.

So, how strong is the sense of place in what you write? In what you read? What would happen if you moved your protagonist to another town?