I’m a big fan of the group blog Writer Unboxed, where more than 30 authors share advice on the craft and business of writing, and on motivation and inspiration. On the surface, this quote seems to speak mainly to authors of fantasy or magical novels, but I think it says more than that. It touches on a point I’ve often made here, that our work should say something true, something not immediately visible. Something you have to quiet your own mind and listen to the world to grasp, and to figure out how to express.
“Where do writers get their ideas? Sure, we might just be making it all up. But what if a writer is the only point of contact with an urgently real-in-its-way world that’s hidden from all others? We rub the membrane thin, and story leaks out. Or maybe we raise our lightning rods, and story flashes down our arms and onto the page. Or we open a door, and the ideas rush in. Choose your metaphor, but in every case, it is your role as a writer to document those moments of connection. Without your books, other worlds remain obscured. Without you, we will never be transported to the time and place that you alone can find.” — Kristen Hacken South, “Thin Places,” on Writer Unboxed
“Poetry is often the art of overhearing yourself say things you didn’t know you knew. It is a learned skill to force yourself to articulate your life, your present world or your possibilities for the future. We need that same skill as an art of survival. We need to overhear the tiny but very consequential things we say that reveal ourselves to ourselves.” – Irish poet David Whyte
Novelist Paul Lynch said something similar in his PBS interview, which I quoted a few weeks ago, about the difficulty of listening to ourselves in the modern world, shaped by the noise of technology. I think the Irish writers are on to something!
How can you make time in your day to quiet yourself enough to hear your own voice?
(Painting: In the Clearwater Valley, by Leslie Budewitz; pastel on suedeboard)
Later this month, at Malice Domestic, the convention celebrating the traditional mystery, I’ll be moderating a conversation between the nominees for Best Contemporary Novel. I’ve been loving reading the books and thinking about what to ask. So I thought I’d bring you into the conversation, and let you meet these terrific women and their books.
In Wined and Died in New Orleans, Ellen Byron’s 2d Vintage Cookbook Mystery, it’s hurricane season in New Orleans and Ricki James-Diaz is trying to shelve her fears and focus on her business, Miss Vee’s Vintage Cookbook and Kitchenware Shop, housed in the magnificent Bon Vee Culinary House Museum. She’s thrilled when repairs on the property unearth crates of very old and valuable French wine. But when a dead body turns up on the property, Ricki has to help solve a murder and untangle family secrets, all while living under the threat of a hurricane that could wipe out everything from her home to Bon Vee.
In Helpless: A Zoe Chambers Mystery by Annette Dashofy, Vance Township Police Chief Pete Adams and his wife, County Coroner Zoe Chambers-Adams, must race against time and a hurricane to capture the mysterious killer, who murdered a young mother and kidnapped her daughter while leaving the only witness, the little girl’s father, critically wounded and trapped beneath a disabled farm tractor. Will Pete be able to stop a savage and cunning predator? And will he and Zoe be able to reunite a family before it’s too late?
In Case of the Bleus by Korina Moss, the secrets to an enigmatic and award-winning blue cheese may be gone forever when its creator –Willa’s former boss, Max — dies. But when the presumed heir is killed for those secrets, the hunt for Max’s Church Bleu begins. When Willa discovers that she’s the intended heir, she must decipher the riddles Max left in order to find the cheese and the killer before the killer finds her.
The Weekend Retreat, Tara Laskowski Every year, the illustrious Van Ness siblings gather at their secluded winery estate for a joint birthday celebration. It’s a tradition they’ve followed nearly all their lives, and now they are back with their significant others for a much-needed weekend of rest and relaxation, away from the public spotlight. With lavish comforts, gorgeous scenery, and indulgent drinking, the trip should be the perfect escape. But it soon becomes clear that even a remote idyllic getaway can’t keep out the problems simmering in each of their lives. As old tensions are reignited, the three couples are pushed to the edge. Will their secrets destroy them, or will they destroy each other first? And who’s been watching them from beyond the vineyard gates?
One murder. Four impossibilities. A fake séance hides a very real crime. Tempest Raj returns in The Raven Thief by Gigi Pandian, where sliding bookcases, trick tables, and hidden reading nooks hide something much more sinister than the Secret Staircase Construction crew ever imagined.
Leslie: What would you most like readers to know about your book? Ellen: It’s funny, twisty, and loaded with the flavor of New Orleans. Annette: At its core, Helpless is a story about friendship and priorities. Sometimes you have to put the demands of your career aside to help a friend. And sometimes, the only thing you can do is just be there to sit and listen. Zoe’s hands are tied during most of the story, yet her simply being there is the most important role in the book. Korina: It’s a mystery with cozy shades of The DaVinci Code and Ocean’s Eleven… with cheese thrown in. Tara: The family in the book is not based on anyone I know, especially my own family (thank god!) Their terrible self-centeredness is all the product of my imagination. But I still love them all. Gigi:The Raven Thief is a locked room mystery, also known as an impossible crime novel, that pays homage to the Golden Age of detective fiction. I wanted to channel authors like John Dickson Carr and Agatha Christie, who wrote fair-play puzzle plot mysteries, but putting my own modern spin on the genre. The puzzle plot is the key to the story-but family, friendship, and food are the heart. With The Raven Thief, I went even further than one locked-room mystery, creating four ways in which the mystery looks impossible.
Leslie: What did you learn, about writing, life, murder, magic, or some other weird or amazing subject, while you were writing this book? Ellen: I happened to be in New Orleans while I was writing this book and my daughter and I had to evacuate for Hurricane Ida. I learned how frightening and traumatic that experience is, and how it takes the resilience of those amazingly strong New Orleanians to move beyond it and get your mojo back. Annette: I learned an inordinate amount of information about incapacitating an old Ford farm tractor and also, about how to fix one. Korina: There can be a dark underbelly to the cheese world. In one year, almost seven hundred blocks of Saint Nectaire were stolen in France for the black market. In Italy, Parmigiano-Reggiano makers have started putting edible microchips the size of a grain of sand on their 90-lb cheese wheels to combat counterfeiters selling rip-offs. It’s no wonder—last year, a 4.8 lb. wheel of Calabro from northern Spain sold for $32,000. Tara: I learn something new about my writing process every time I work on a book. It’s usually a very painful lesson, though. This time, I learned that I need to do a lot of “people work” upfront and really understand my characters and their motivations before I start writing, because so much of their actions and the plot depends on who they are, essentially, as humans. I didn’t do enough of that in my early drafts of this book, thinking I’d figure it out as I wrote, and that got me into trouble! Gigi: At the center of each Secret Staircase Mystery is a renovation project, building magic into peoples’ homes through elements like sliding bookcases and secret doors that lead to hidden libraries. In The Raven Thief, the woman who’s hired Secret Staircase Construction hosts a book club focused on classic mystery novels, and she also requests a faux séance in the room. To create the most fun book club room for mystery enthusiasts and a space that would work for a séance-gone-wrong, I reread many of my favorite classic mysteries with an eye towards elements I could turn into architectural details, and I learned more about how fraudulent spiritualists faked séances. I thought I knew a lot about how tricksters could fake séances, but wow there are a lot of tricks!
Leslie: What keeps you going, on days when writing is hard? Ellen: Deadlines! Annette: My readers. I’ll never forget the email I received very early in my writing career. A woman wrote to tell me she’d bought Circle of Influence as a Mother’s Day gift for her mom who was going through chemotherapy. Reading my book during the treatments helped her mother take her mind off her illness. I learned this mother and daughter lived about a half hour away, and at her next chemo session, I went to the hospital and sat with them, signed the book, and had pictures taken for them. It was a humbling experience and a stark reminder of the real reason I do this. Korina: Hearing from readers, especially when my books are getting them through a hard time in life. Tara: When I’m having a really bad writing day, I try to tell myself, “It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be there.” My wonderful agent Michelle Richter once told me, “You can’t edit it if it’s not on the page.” So I give myself permission to suck, hoping that once there are words, it’ll be easier to fix them. It doesn’t always work, but it is a kind of writer self-care, a sort of grace we can extend ourselves so we don’t get so wrapped up in our heads. And most of the time, when I go back later and re-read it, it’s not as bad as I feared. Gigi: Connecting with my fellow book people is the best! Some of the readers and writers I’ve met since I started writing have become my closest friends. My fellow Agatha nominee Ellen Byron is one of the fabulous women in my writers group! I always want each new book I write to be better than my last, so if I’m ever feeling stressed out that a book isn’t coming together as I want it to, I simply chat with one of my author pals or pick up one of my beaten-up old Elizabeth Peters novels to read a few pages. Either one does the trick to inspire me.
THE AUTHORS: ELLEN BYRON: Winner of multiple Agatha and Lefty awards, Ellen Byron transitioned from a twenty-plus-year career writing television sitcoms to penning humorous mysteries and has never been happier. She is also an award-winning playwright but considers working as a cater-waiter for Martha Stewart her most impressive achievement.
ANNETTE DASHOFY: USA Today bestseller Annette Dashofy is the author of fifteen novels including the seven-time Agatha Award nominated Zoe Chambers mystery series about a paramedic-turned-coroner in rural Pennsylvania as well as the Detective Honeywell series set along Lake Erie. Her standalone novel, Death By Equine, won the 2021 Dr. Tony Ryan Book Award for excellence in thoroughbred racing literature.
KORINA MOSS is the author of the Cheese Shop Mystery series (St. Martin’s Press) set in the Sonoma Valley, including the Agatha Award winner for Best First Novel, Cheddar Off Dead. She lives in Connecticut, where she is devoted to the art of cheese.
TARA LASKOWSKI is the author of the suspense novels The Weekend Retreat, The Mother Next Door and One Night Gone, winner of the Agatha, Macavity, and Anthony awards. She also wrote two short story collections, Modern Manners for Your Inner Demons and Bystanders. Her short fiction has won Agatha and Thriller awards, and she was the longtime editor of the online flash fiction journal SmokeLong Quarterly. She lives in Virginia with her husband, crime writer Art Taylor, and their son Dashiell.
GIGI PANDIAN is a USA Today bestselling mystery author, breast cancer survivor, and locked-room mystery enthusiast. She writes the Secret Staircase mysteries, the Accidental Alchemist mysteries, and the Jaya Jones Treasure Hunt mysteries.
If you’re headed to Malice Domestic this year, I hope to see you at 3:00 Friday afternoon, in Ballroom B/C, for what I know will be a delightful conversation. If not, I hope you’re intrigued by the nominated books and will pick them up for a guaranteed good read!
Jeffrey Brown : “You have written about the role of the novel today and I guess a concern about whether it can still be valued, even important, have a place in our society.”
Paul Lynch: “Yes. It goes back to what I call the whisper in the ear. I mean, the novelist can whisper in the reader’s ear, and that’s a beautiful conversation. There’s also whisper in the ear that you have with yourself. But we live in a time where technology has done something to us.
We are no longer, for many of us anyway — unless you cultivate it and shape it, we are not in tune with ourselves. We’re not hearing the voice in the ear. And it’s harder to read fiction too. And I think that a culture that cannot hear itself think is a culture that is in serious trouble. …
And I like that idea of fiction just being a little bit more dangerous, a little bit more engaging, pushing into — seeking this hidden charge of things and giving the reader maybe a little bit more electricity, but doing it respectfully.”
“If I’d a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn’t a tackled it.” — Mark Twain, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Some days are like that. Just keep going. Remember, you can do anything for 15 minutes, and that might be enough to write a page, write a chorus, or plan the colors for a new weaving
Flow. We know it when we feel it, but what is it? How can we cultivate it? A new study done at the Drexel University Creativity Research Lab used brain imaging to study jazz guitarists working on an improvisation and summarizes the results this way:
“The findings reveal the creative flow state involves two key factors: extensive experience, which leads to a network of brain areas specialized for generating the desired type of ideas, plus the release of control — “letting go” — to allow this network to work with little or no conscious supervision.”
I like this so much, not just because it rings true, but because it also tells us what we can do to experience flow more often and more readily: practice the work, whether it’s chord structures or writing dialogue, creating new pathways in the brain, and practice giving up conscious control of the process and the results.
I’m deep in a first draft, at that stage where I’m not sure that anything I’m doing makes any sense, that I’ll be able to make it make sense, or that readers will care. Whether you write, paint, make music, or create in any of countless other ways, I am confident that you know the feeling.
And that’s about the only thing I’m confident of write — er, right — now. So I like these words from my favorite blogs on writing, one of the contributors I always read because I always know she’ll give me useful, practical insights.
“Accept that your work will never feel satisfactory, because without that self-critical element, we’d never try to improve. Our yearning to accomplish more is what makes it possible to endure a learning process that for quite some time may offer little promise of external reward. . . . [I]t isn’t up to us to believe in ourselves, it’s up to us to do the work.” – Kathryn Craft, on Writer Unboxed
I’ve been emphasizing the value of a schedule, of a regular commitment to writing. One more quote to bolster that:
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days.” — Annie Dillard, in The Writing Life
What’s my routine? After decades working as a lawyer in firms and courts, now that I’m pretty much writing fulltime, I still keep office hours. Ideally, I’m “on the page” — that is, writing or editing — by 8:30, sometimes 9:00. I work until just after noon, eat lunch, and tackle promotion and writing business, along with personal stuff, in the afternoons. When I’m researching, or pondering, scouting the world and my brain for the story, that can get thrown off. I don’t make appointments on Mondays unless absolutely necessary, so I can start the week focused and protect my time.
Your life is probably more complicated than mine, but think about your schedule, a routine you can create and keep. Protect it. Honor it, and your creative spirit will shine. I promise.
You’ve all heard me talk about intentional creativity and the importance of making a commitment to do the work, whatever your work is. It’s easy to start the year excited about our creative plans, but sometimes we need a little help making them become reality.
Pencils (photo by the author)
That’s where a creative routine comes in. As my writer pal Mark Hummel, who also writes as Mark Leichliter, says,
“The trick is to put writing first even if it isn’t literally the first thing you do, and if it’s not, then creating a ironclad routine to which you adhere . . . That can be to write an hour before bedtime or for half an hour in your car at lunch, a set number of pages produced while hiding out in your secretive place so that you can be undisturbed. Whatever it is, I am convinced that routine matters.”
Some people say you have to write every day. You don’t. It’s ideal, but life isn’t always like that. I wrote my first three manuscripts on Fridays, because that was the time I had. My muse, or creative voice, or subconscious, showed up and we did the work–because she knew I would be there, sitting in my office in the back bedroom of a little white stucco farmhouse at the foot of the Mission Mountains.
“If you are stuck and asking what should happen next, head straight for what cannot happen. That’s the direction you want to go. The goal is not to play within the rules, but to break them. Story is not about what is realistic, reasonable, safe and ordinary. It is about the extreme things that happen to people who are not ready. It’s about the dramatic things that people like you and me might do-but do not-under duress.”
– Don Maass, Writer Unboxed: It Can’t Happen Here, 3/4/2020
I first heard Don say this years ago when he spoke at the Flathead River Writers Conference held by the Authors of the Flathead, a multi-genre writers’ group based in Kalispell, Montana. I remember the moment clearly. “What is one thing your main character would never do?” he asked. “Wear lipstick,” I wrote in my notebook, clueless enough not to realize what he would say next. “Now make them do it.”
And that’s become one of my most important tools for unfolding plot from the characters themselves. Not wearing lipstick might seem trivial, but in that unpublished manuscript, it led me to think about where my MC, a deputy sheriff, might feel she had to wear lipstick. Another character is a national news reporter who’s just been fired from her job and retreats to her summer home in Montana where, naturally, she responds to her lover’s unsolved murder by filming a television segment, including an interview with the deputy sheriff.
In my Spice Shop mysteries, Pepper Reece would never ask her ex-husband, a Seattle cop on the bike patrol, for help — until she has to.
What would your character never do? Betray a friend? Betray a confidence? Fire a gun? Run into a burning building? Run from a burning building? Take a welding class? Wear pink? Eat a sweet potato? Make it matter. Make her do it.
