Recently in Being a writer Category

I haven’t posted over the last three weeks. Been busy. I’ve got some time on my hands, so I’ve been working on the book. Doing a lot of character work; I expect that to continue over the next two to three weeks. Then it should be about a week to really refine and define my plot outline, then I start writing.

I’m trying to spend about three hours per day doing the actual preparation/writing. I figure I might do 40-60 pages per week, over 200 per month that way. In three to four months, I should have a workable first draft. I also plan to spend another 1-2 hours/day reading and rough editing the morning's work. We’ll see if I can keep to this schedule.

I also may try, between now and the end of the year to get one or two stories done. During this period that I’m not actually writing the book, I think it would be good to keep practicing some general fiction techniques. These may, or may not, be mystery type fiction. I may also try to post here a bit more, just to get a bit of variety; this won’t be a main focus though.

Wish me luck and keep me in your prayers.

Good advice for any writer. On second thought, this is good advice for anyone.

We must always tell what we see. Above all, and this is more difficult, we must always see what we see.

I have just completed a twelve or fourteen week workshop on novel writing and now have about twelve to fifteen thousand words of my mystery written. Perhaps, it’s fairer to say I have about twelve to fifteen thousand words of my mystery in first draft form. It’s a mess.

My problem is my main character, Joseph P. Morgan, forensic accountant and part-time, third generation rancher. The conventional wisdom is crafting a protagonist is that he or she must be strong, intelligent, and determined in fighting crime and capturing the criminal, usually a dangerous murderer. On the other hand, the conventional wisdom says the author should try to show the personal foibles and weakness of this character. The hero or heroine should have obstacles, both external and internal, to overcome in their pursuit of justice.

This is all well and good, and perfectly understandable, but in the hands of some writers, it leads to a main character that is hopelessly incompetent. The reader wonders how in the world the guy ever managed to get up in the morning, much less overcome an intelligent, ruthless and generally nasty adversary. One reason I chose to make my hero a cowboy and rancher is to draw on the legend of the West, the self-reliance, strength, that every western hero has to display. I hoped that this would provide a protagonist who is, at the very least strong, competent, and believable as a tracker down of criminals. The problem I’m struggling with is that Joe Morgan is coming across as a stereotype of the old west cowboy, and not a real person.

The other part of my problem is that I’ve created another character to serve as a friend and advisor to my protagonist. This guy has a PhD in history from the University of Michigan, has recently retired from a career in the “U.S. Department of State�, and a serious background in U.S. Army Special Operations activities. In his retirement, he has started work on the definitive biography of John Quincy Adams. And, oh, by the way, he only has one hand, his right, and wears a hook on the stump of his left wrist. The thing is that everyone who has read what I have so far thinks that my historian character is stronger and might be a better lead than Joe Morgan.

This is probably a fair assessment, but I’m not sure what to do about it. I think I’m kind of burned out on the book and need to put it aside for a while, especially after fourteen weeks of intense concentration on it. I have become too wrapped up in the story and need to back away for a while. Since Advent is coming up, I’m going to try focusing on more general writing and reading. One thing I hope to do is spend Advent returning, or rekindling my Franciscan roots. I think I’ll have more on that in a later post.

Steven did another comment to my post on writing a mystery and he brings up a number of points that I just have to comment on. One thing I most enjoy about his writing is that he is one thought provoking guy. These comments may not be in this post but in one or two to follow, with first priority being on modern poetry.

First, though, some warm up work for my writing session tonight.

One thing that I like in a novel, and especially in a mystery, is to have the author deliver a convincing sense of place. For some reason, unknown to me, I am strongly drawn to writing that makes location or setting almost another character in the story. This prejudice is a strong one; I love Steinbeck and don’t care for Hemingway. Not that Hemingway doesn’t set his stories is distinct locales, but, to me, at least, the location is mere ornament in his stories, a backdrop to make the story seem exotic or different. As Gertude Stein once said, “there’s no there there.” As you might expect, in mysteries, I enjoy Robert Parker and his Spenser series and Steve Hamilton with his Alex McNight books. Now, talk about a location, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan is one I would never have dreamed of to put a detective into, but there it is. Hamilton really captures what it is like to live in so remote a location and, even though the plots are a bit weak, I still enjoy his books.

This is one problem I’m having; I set my detective story in Colorado, but I do not have a strong sense of this place yet. As I may have written here before, I spent most of my life in El Paso, Texas and have only lived here about six years. El Paso is a place that oozes history, beginning with the Conquistadors who went through there in the 16th century; to the Franciscan friars who braved the Chihuahuan desert a hundred years later. The spirit of those friars, who founded missions named Ysleta sur del Pueblo and San Elizaro, mission churches that are still there, is alive everywhere you turn.

Then there were the mountain men, who came through a hundred and fifty years later, men who fought Apaches and discovered silver near Silver City, NM, their spirit, and heritage, is everywhere. Today the descendants of the Scots mountain man, James Kirker, all now Spanish speaking Mexican Americans, still live near and work the copper mines there at Silver City. And then there are the Mescalero Apaches, who under the inspiration of a chief named Wendell Chino, now running a ski resort and gambling casino in the New Mexico mountains near Ruidoso. The common thread for all of these men is, of course, the Rio Grande, the “Great River” that has its own biography written by Paul Horgan. This is an area that leaves anyone who cares with a sense of the place.

But Colorado has no such history. Colorado Springs was founded only a hundred and twenty years ago. It was a resort, a summer retreat for a retired Civil War general. The mountains here were too formidable an obstacle for the early explorers and pioneers, they either stayed east or went south to get around them. In a sense, the mountains are going to have to be my character.

I’m running on, and perhaps for now, this is enough of a warm up. I’ll keep you posted.

I’m doing a post as a reply to Steven’s kind post in response to my announcement that I am working on a mystery novel. The book’s lead will be a “semi-pro”, a forensic accountant, self-employed and nearing retirement, who is also a life-long Colorado rancher. A forensic accountant is one who works at uncovering fraud and other examples of white collar crime. The character is drawn from my own experience – early in my career I worked some assignments as a “fraud auditor,” the rest is just made up.

I don’t know that I feel very badly about my having to be so focused in my writing, I am surprised. I don’t know why it should be so, but it is. This is especially true when I try to write, or even read, any poetry. I find it completely distracting, enjoyable, but still it really blocks any work I try to do in fiction. Steven says that you can’t help but write, and I think that is likely true of most of us who have attempted a blog, but I know I can’t match the kind of volume you are talking about. I think I must be unusual in this regard. I’ve thought about it a bit, and I’ve come to think this is due to my being an accountant. I want to do things in an orderly, structured way. I’m not sure, but I’m coming to accept it as a sign of God’s will.

What I do feel highly self-conscious about is writing a mystery. I have always regarded the mystery novel as an inferior breed in the world of fiction and literature. I think of mysteries as little more than distractions, entertainments, rather than serious literature. This is, of course, not always true, famous and very good authors have written mystery books. If you study what mystery writers say about the genre, they tend to trace their origin back to Dostoyevsky, and include Poe and Chesterton and others too numerous to mention.

The one good thing that I keep consoling myself is that, in a mystery, usually, good overcomes evil, a disruption of good order is set right, and all live happily ever after. I will certainly strive to achieve that outcome. As I envision the series, the lead character is on a path to real conversion, from little real faith to something much greater. The trick is to deal with all this without hitting the reader over the head about it.

Another good thing that has come from working in fiction is that I have learned some things about people while trying to “create” characters. They take on a life of their own and I keep discovering new things about them; this is true even for characters that I have done a lot of work on. I wonder if our Lord ever feels that way about us? It has given me an entirely new outlook on people.

I may post here, from time to time, anyway, as a “warm-up” to my more serious pursuits, it seems to help to get 300 to 500 words down on paper before getting down to the business of creating fiction. I can't promise much in terms of quality, but this may be of interest as the diary of a novel. Anyway, this post has certainly reached my 500 word limit, so perhaps it’s time to get to work.

Thank you, Steven, for your comment, I appreciate your thoughts.