Rewriting! Rewriting!

I wonder if I'm weird or if other writers are like me. I can't just start writing, go to the end, and then worry about going back and shaping things up. I'm writing mysteries, for heaven's sake. Everything has got to fit all along the way. Every clue has to fall in a certain place. Every important discovery has to be foreshadowed. As I write, I get interesting ideas additional to my outline, and I write them in, but then I have to go way back to the beginning and rewrite in order to foreshadow and to make sure the logic is consistent. If, for instance, I suddenly decide it would be cool if a villain had a missing trigger finger, then he must have a missing trigger finger in all preceding chapters. And if, in those preceding chapters, I have to give him a different weapon because of the problem with the finger, then I have to go back and change the weapon. And if, while changing the weapon, I get a great idea about a physical habit he develops because of the particular weapon, then I have to go back and forwards and add in the interesting part about the habit. If I don't take care of it at the time, things get all mixed up. I often tell people that my books don't get longer, they get fatter.

Different Voices

At one of our meetings, the members of my writers group pointed out that my two main characters, Louise and Erleen, spoke in the same voice and I should do something to distinguish them. Excellent comment, but how? They were of a similar age, both widows, both antiques dealers, both had lived in Minnesota for most of their lives. I didn't have the writing experience to make them have different (enough) voices, so I tried what I felt at the time was a cheap cop-out. I decided Erleen had been born and raised in the South and had moved to Minnesota right after college when she was married. I left her with a Minnesota speech style, but a habit of throwing in Southern colloquialisms as a sort of flirtatious device that had become a habit. I think it worked well. Later, when the book was finished, a reader told me that Erleen was the most delightful character in the book because of the way she talked. Isn't that just finer than frog hair?

Lengthy Character Descriptions

Many writing advisors caution against lengthy character descriptions, and when I started to write, I heeded them. As I introduced my characters in "Nice Girls Don't Bite," I tried to keep their descriptions to a brief simile. "She looked like a bright-eyed inquisitive kitten." The ladies in my writers group protested. "What is she wearing?" I heard repeatedly. I gave in a little. "She was dressed in the height of fashion." That wasn't good enough. "What is she wearing?" they repeated. Pointing out that the readership for cozies is primarily women, they insisted that clothing descriptions were necessary. Okay, I finally gave in, but I used the surrender as a springboard for characterization. My high fashion character was Erleen, so every time she changed clothes I made an item of apparel useful in other places. For example, fifteen thin silver bracelets on one wrist that quivered and clinked with her indignation in a police interview. Boots with Lucite heels that prevented her from running as far as Louise suggested in a panicky situation. I tried not to get too carried away with clothing description, but I have to admit that what Erleen wore became an interesting and sometimes funny aspect of the novel. (I hope.)

Where Are We?

I have small colored sticky notes taped around my computer screen that I try to read often as I compose. One of them says, "What time is it? What day is it? Where are we?" I have discovered that getting that information into each new chapter smoothly is sometimes easy, sometimes almost impossible, depending on the situation. Some day it might be fun to sponsor a contest to see who could write the best first sentence of a chapter that has time, day, and location in it. "It was a dark and stormy night," is, of course, already taken.

Snowbird--Wrong and Right

Snowbird came back from her southern island and re-entered the critique circle, which I was quite cozy with by then. She looked at the first sentence of my week's output and said, "Cross this phrase out, you don't need it." "Get rid of this 'was' and the word 'never.'" "In the second sentence, why are you saying 'in the house?' Everyone knows it's in the house, delete that phrase." "Tighten this third sentence up by..." Sentence by sentence, word by word, she was re-writing my chapter. I was furious. Had the woman no sense of how to give constructive criticism? I gave her a glare that would have stopped a rhino. The next time she opened her mouth to re-write what I had written, I glared fiercely at her. Eventually, she got the message and quit re-writing. That was a year-and-a-half ago, and I have now matured enough in my writing to realize her corrections were exactly what I needed to do. I wish, though, she had said, "You're over-writing and it looks amateurish. You need to go back and pare this down to nice tight sentences that flow smoothly." Now THAT I would have understood. And now that I'm writing less amateurishly, I look forward to her return north. It is hoped that she will have fewer edits, and no doubt she hopes that I will quit glaring at her.

The Bear in a Bar

One very minor drawback to my writers group was that the others were writing literary fiction and I was writing commercial fiction. "So what," you say, "good writing is good writing, yes?" Yeeeeess, but... I like to explain the difference this way: Imagine you're writing a joke book. You go to a meeting of my writers group, and say, "Here's my first joke. A bear went into a bar and said to the bartender---" You'd get that far before a barrage of questions came at you. "What kind of a bear is it?" "How old is the bear?" "Is the bear married?" "Does the bear regularly come into this bar?" "Are the bear and the bartender friends?" "Is the bear an alcoholic?" "You need a lot more back story before you go much farther." To the joke reader, "A bear went into a bar..." is all the back story you need. To a mystery writer, moving things along is frequently more important than back story. (You no doubt notice that I use the past tense quite a bit. That's because I'm going back to the beginning of when I started writing. Eventually I'll catch up and we'll be in the present.)

Finding a Writers Group

I found a small group of writers willing to accept me into their circle. With me added, there were four-and-a-half of us (one was a snowbird with us only six months of every year). We met once a week at a coffeehouse and emailed our pieces a few days ahead of time. Cee-Cee was an exquisite writer. Everything she wrote was concise, every word a gem. She was writing a novel about a cancer survivor who goes to the World Poker Tournament. She gave my writing a flattering amount of attention, and a truly helpful amount of criticism. Dee-Dee wrote nostalgia pieces about young love. She was quiet, not offering many detailed comments, but when she did speak up, she made a thematic suggestion that instantly took root in my mind, grew like kudzu, and became almost a whole new exciting chapter. Mimi was an attractive young model who was writing a novel, short stories, and a play. Her special talent was portraying dysfunctional (air-headed?) young women. Most of her comments didn't speak to what I was trying to do and I tended not to pay all that much attention, except... Once in a while she would say, "You know, you have a habit of..." And, shazam! she would put her pretty finger right smack on a sneaky/lazy writing trick that I thought I was getting away with. I looked forward to every meeting because the group was doing me so much good. The exceptions were the Snowbird and the Bear. More about them to come.