A Pound of Flesh: Journaling

The all-powerful "They," whoever these experts are, suggest that writers should journal their daily experiences to help out their writing. Thus, I begin the process. But, first a short prologue to aid the reader on a little background.

A month ago, we returned from a Caribbean cruise and as several of you may know, the cuisine on a large cruise ship is very plentiful and very tasty. Both of which are a problem. Plus, one has to add in all those vacation rum and cokes, not to mention a few rounds of of tropical concoctions served up from various fruits and alcohol. The conclusion of this type of situation usually results in the start of a well-intentioned diet shortly after the traveler returns home.

However, in my case and in the interests of full transparency, I must confess that the weight problem started shortly before we left for the cruise. Somehow, I had gained three pounds before embarkation. My only excuse is that I must have been anticipating the feast to come. But then, as so often happens, succumbing to temptation is sooner or later  followed by remorse and a certain amount of pain while trying to get back on track.

Okay, so here's the deal, starting with the first full day back home:

Sunday:  220.6 lbs.
     ate wisely, no desserts, no alcohol
     Goal: to get back to my 1967 going-to-Vietnam weight of 199 lbs.

Monday:  219.6 lbs.
     ate a big breakfast, no lunch, had soup for supper, no sweets
    okay, you got me, I had a couple of rum and cokes, it's called tapering off, besides, I needed some
    compensation for having to shovel 4" of snow this morning. Snow leeched out my new Caribbean
    tan.

Tuesday:  218.6 lbs.
     don't know why that .6 pound thing keeps hanging on, but hey I'm losing a pound a day so far and
     I have a weight loss haircut to look forward to this afternoon.
     ate a good breakfast, MAY skip lunch.
     Okay, so I put a little white rum in my cranberry juice for breakfast, but I've still got that weight
     loss haircut coming up to help me stay on pace.
     Made half a sandwich with deli-sliced ham, but it was the thick sliced bread, not the thin sliced
     type of sandwich bread, so had to add more ham. Need to speak to wife about buying some thin
     type sandwich bread.
     This afternoon, even though I told her not to do it, the wife baked blueberry muffins for the two
      grandsons to have a snack after school. Those warm muffins are great when they are fresh out of
     the oven. In my defense, I did NOT put butter on them.
     Slipped a little on the rum and cokes after supper, but figured them as a reward for doing so well
     with the weight.

Well, here we are with DAY 4. Today's weight came out at 218.0 pounds. That's still good, I lost .6 pounds from yesterday. Finally, got rid of that .6 thing following me around on the scales every morning. The haircut weight loss must've worked. Not sure what to do about tomorrow. I've only got so much hair.
had a good breakfast, most important meal of the day.
Okay, I did pour some Kalua in my coffee cup, but there was also some coffee in that same cup. It's something I learned from a friend on the ship one morning at breakfast.
Too much good food in the house to skip lunch. Waste not, want not. May have to do a few situps to counteract lunch intake. Supper will be another problem. Don't think I can do that many situps. Wonder if a couple of pushups would suffice to counteract supper?
Rum all gone. Need to make a resupply run.

DAY 5: 219.2 lbs.  Ooops!
Those two growing teenage grandsons coming to the house for a hearty breakfast five mornings a week before school are putting a kink in my diet plans. Wife doesn't help the situation either with all her baking of cookies and other high calorie snacks in the afternoon for after school treats.
Hid the bottle of Vanilla Crown Royal immediately after breakfast, but evidently not well enough. Found it again behind the cans of Coke in the refrigerator right after supper. Gotta get better at hiding things. Still haven't made that resupply run.

DAY 6:  2xx.6  lbs.   Damn!
Well, I gave it a shot, but don't think this journaling thing is going to work out for me.

END of Journal

When Murder Is a Family Business

  Family Fortnight +   Leading up to the International Day of Families on the 15^th of May, we bring you the fifteenth in a series about mystery writers’ take on families. Settle back and enjoy!

by B.K. Stevens

one of our bat mitzvah invitation covers

Like most parents, my husband and I wanted to create a close, loving family with our children. So we had long, chatty dinners around the kitchen table and made reading out loud at bedtime a nightly ritual. We went on lots of outings, too, from picnics in the park to a Beach Boys concert at the county fair, from frequent visits to the public library to trips to national monuments ranging from the Lincoln Memorial to Mount Rushmore. And we always made a big deal about birthday and holiday celebrations.

My husband, Dennis, and I cherished all those experiences, and I know our daughters did, too. When I think about the times that really made us into a close family, though, I think about times when we all worked on a project together. For example, when our older daughter, Sarah, had her bat mitzvah, we decided to do all the cooking and baking ourselves, and we also decorated homemade invitations, using a string-painting technique our younger daughter, Rachel, had learned in kindergarten. Everyone enjoyed working together so much that we did the cooking, baking, and invitation-making again for Rachel's bat mitzvah.

When I was volunteering as principal of the religious school, we all worked on costumes and props for the annual Purim plays. And, of course, we also plotted the occasional murder together.

my first published story

I didn't start writing mysteries until Sarah was about three, and at first I didn't take it seriously. One idea for a mystery plot had been gnawing away at me for a while, and I decided to play around with it for a few weeks before getting back to more serious pursuits such as grading freshman compositions and tracking down AWOL My Little Ponies. If Dennis had said one discouraging word to me during those early days, if he'd made one snide remark about mysteries or one comment about the amount of time I was wasting on a novel I'd never finish, I'm positive I would have given the whole thing up immediately, embarrassed I'd ever attempted something so out of character for me. But he didn't.

From the first moment, he was encouraging and enthusiastic. He had ideas about how to develop characters more fully, about how to add twists to the plot and depth to the themes. And every evening, he wanted to read what I'd written. I finished the novel. Naturally, nobody had any interest in publishing it, but by then I was hooked on writing mysteries, and I decided to give short stories a try. The first few went nowhere, but in 1987– the same year our younger daughter was born– Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine accepted "True Detective."

Dennis continued, and still continues, to read everything I write– usually, several drafts of everything I write– and to make suggestions that always improve those drafts immeasurably. For a while, though, I didn't tell our daughters much about the stories I was writing. After all, they were so young, so innocent, so vulnerable– I wanted them to be daydreaming about rainbows and kittens, not arsenic and blunt instruments.

When Sarah was seven, Woman's World accepted a story I judged tame enough for her to read. It centered on a jewel theft, not a murder, with no trace of violence either described or implied. She liked the story and rewarded me with the lovely note you see here. (Of course, since this was a Woman's World story, it wasn't published under the title I'd given it. Woman's World chose to call it "Baby Talk"– why, I'll never know.)

As the years went on, I began letting the girls read more of my stories– first Sarah, then Rachel– and mysteries became a frequent topic of family discussions. When I ran into a plot snag or some other problem, I'd bring it up at the dinner table, and everyone would offer suggestions.

Once, when Rachel was nine, I needed to think of a place where a character could hide a small camera. Rachel said she could sew it up inside a stuffed animal. Good idea. Rachel was thrilled when the May, 1996 AHMM came out, and the illustration for the story showed an oversized stuffed bunny propped against a bed pillow. A couple of years later, Sarah mentioned an old Jewish folk custom she'd read about, and I thought it might make an interesting clue. That inspired the first story in my Leah Abrams series for AHMM. To acknowledge my daughters' contributions to that story and others, I gave Leah clever young daughters named Sarah and Rachel. When I wrote the second story in that series, I was stuck for a closing line. Rachel helped out by suggesting a witty, subtly snarky remark a character could make. Naturally, she assigned that remark to her namesake. It did sound like something Rachel would say, so I honored her choice. And both girls helped out eagerly when I wrote a story set at a high school, bringing it to life by supplying plenty of examples of disciplinary absurdities and letting me know when my slang was out of date.

Rachel

Even after the girls went to college, the consultations continued– they continue to this day. I e-mail drafts of every story to them, and they respond with criticisms, compliments, and suggestions. No one could ask for sharper, more perceptive beta readers. They've contributed story ideas, too, and sometimes told me about nasty people they've met, people who have ended up as victims or murderers. (People should think twice before being mean to one of my daughters.) And, as they've developed new areas of expertise, I've often consulted them for information.

If I had to pick one work that truly was a family project, it would have to be my first published novel, Interpretation of Murder (Black Opal Books, 2015). Sarah has always been fascinated by American Sign Language– while she was still a teenager, she took evening courses at the local community college and earned her state certification as an interpreter before graduating from high school. She continued her study of ASL during and after college and is now a nationally certified interpreter.

About eight years ago, she suggested I write a story about an interpreter working at a murder trial. She helped me develop the plot and devise clues related to sign language, and she gave me plenty of background information to make the story more realistic, everything from examples of ASL idioms to details about how interpreters dress. The story appeared in AHMM and won a Derringer. (Well, half a Derringer– it was a tie.) It's now also self-published as an Amazon single, under the title "Silent Witness." (Rachel took charge of the self-publishing process, since I lack the technical expertise to do it myself; she also handles the technical side of my blog, The First Two Pages. Anyway, I finally got to use the title I'd chosen for that first Woman's World story.)

I liked the protagonist of "Silent Witness," Jane Ciardi, so much that I began thinking of writing a novel about her. The project involved a number of challenges, but luckily I had family members who could help with every one of them. I wanted Jane's profession to be integral to the plot, not just a job she goes to from time to time while investigating crimes as an amateur sleuth. The whole family helped generate ideas, and Sarah recommended books I should read and provided helpful examples from her own experiences. Once I started writing, she scrutinized every page, checking to make sure the book provides readers with genuine insights into Deaf culture and ASL interpreting.

Other challenges involved setting. Our family was living in Cleveland when I wrote the AHMM story, so I set it there; I wanted to set the novel in Cleveland, too, but Dennis and I had moved to Virginia. Rachel was living in Cleveland, though– she went back there after graduating from college to spend a few years with old friends while studying interior design and working part-time. So Rachel became my consultant on all things Cleveland, checking out locations when my memory and Google came up short.

For example, I needed a semi-spooky setting for a tense confrontation between my protagonist and a volatile, sometimes violent suspect. Rachel suggested Squire's Castle, an abandoned shell of building that's now part of the city park system. It's supposed to be haunted, and that, of course, adds to its charm. Perfect. Also, Rachel's part-time job was at an upscale fitness center. When Dennis and I visited the center and listened to Rachel's stories about the people she met there, I decided a fictionalized version of it could play an important role in the novel, as a place some characters suspect to be a front for shady goings-on. Rachel helped me with the layout of my fictionalized center and supplied many details to make descriptions of it more realistic.

Squire's Castle

But I also had problems with my protagonist. In the AHMM story, Jane Ciardi is perceptive but passive. She's intelligent and observant enough to realize something is amiss at the trial, but when she has a chance to try to set things right, she loses her nerve, hoping the jury will reach the right verdict even if she does nothing. The story ends with her decision to stay silent. I thought that made Jane an interesting, believable character for a stand-alone story. But readers expect amateur sleuths in mystery novels to be made of sterner stuff. I had to toughen Jane up. So I made her into someone who's learned from her mistakes and resolved she'll never again let fear keep her from doing what's right. As a concrete way of underscoring the idea that Jane is now someone who fights back, I decided to make her a martial artist.

Dennis

Luckily, I had a resident expert to help me describe the martial arts class Jane is taking and her occasional run-ins with hostile sorts. Dennis is a fifth-degree black belt in sogu ryu bujutsu and has also studied over half a dozen other martial arts. He'd helped me with action scenes in several stories– for example, in the Iphigenia Woodhouse stories, Harriet Russo is a black belt who sometimes tosses a suspect aside– but this was by far our most ambitious project to date. We were determined to describe every class, every confrontation in realistic detail.

Since I'm not a martial artist– not by a long shot– we decided we had to act scenes out so I could understand them well enough to describe them. The process sometimes got uncomfortable. Dennis is the expert, so he always played the role of the person who twists arms and lands kicks, forcing the other person– that would be me– to the ground. He was always careful and never delivered full-force punches; even so, I received frequent reminders of why I'd long ago decided I never, ever wanted to study martial arts. We usually had to act moves out several times, pausing often so I could jot down notes about how to describe something.

my husband clobbering kid

It was a lot of work and not always a lot of fun, but we were pleased with the way the scenes turned out– so pleased I decided to write a novel in which martial arts would play an even more central role, a young adult mystery called Fighting Chance (Poisoned Pen Press, 2015). This time, the featured martial art was krav maga, the Israeli self-defense system Dennis was studying at the time.

Dennis beats up another little kid

Once again, he took charge of the choreography, and after the book was published, he visited middle schools and high schools with me to promote it. I talked about elements of characterization, and he demonstrated krav maga techniques.

Guess which part of the presentation students enjoyed more. I'm happy to say that when he demonstrated those techniques, Dennis used student volunteers as his victims, nor me.

Dennis also comes to conferences with me, to help force bookmarks on passersby and give me pep talks before panels. Our daughters have gotten involved with promotion, too.

Rachel and guests at the Agatha banquet

For example, when I gave an Authors' Alley presentation about Interpretation of Murder at Malice Domestic in 2015, Sarah came to Bethesda to do some on-the-spot interpreting and answer questions about sign language.

The next year, Fighting Chance was nominated for an Agatha, and so was an AHMM story, "A Joy Forever"– and the day before I planned to leave for this once-in-a-lifetime, double-nomination Malice Domestic, I had a bad fall, breaking my right arm and seriously injuring my right leg. The doctor declared surgery essential and travel insanely reckless, so Malice was out of the question. Dennis, of course, stayed with me to help me through. We called Rachel, and she stepped in to host our table at the Agatha banquet. (Like Sarah, Rachel lives in Maryland now, so we're all within a few hours of each other– we're close geographically, as well as in other ways.) Several guests wrote to me later to say what a charming hostess Rachel had been. She even got a list of names and addresses, so we could mail guests the table favors we'd planned to bring to Bethesda.

where it all began

So if you want to create a close family, here's my advice: Put your kids to work. Work alongside them, all striving to reach a common goal. Sadly, I'm not sure of how well this approach works if the goal is cleaning out the garage. But it works fine if the goal is something everyone will enjoy, such as string-painting invitations or plotting the murder of a rigid, unreasonable high-school principal. Seriously, though, I think writers who are parents often worry that their work will pull them away from their families, that their children will resent hours spent toiling at the word processor instead of playing in the park. If we find ways to involve our children in our work, though, I think that brings us closer. Playing together is important– we always need to find time for that. But working together may be an even more potent way of creating deep, lasting unity.

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Midwestern Mysteries, the current issue of Mystery Readers Journal, contains my article about the role Cleveland plays in Interpretation of Murder. I hope you get a chance to check out "Cleveland: Drownings, Ghosts, and Rock and Roll."

Journaling and Outlining

This column continues threads from (read "leans heavily on") two recent posts, one by Brian Thornton on journal keeping and one by John Floyd on outlining. I'm both a journal keeper and an outliner, and I don't know which is more important to my writing. Prior to reading the aforementioned posts, I probably would have said that outlining was a defining characteristic of my approach to mystery writing, while journaling was merely a secondary or even incidental one, like my preference for writing in longhand. (It was good enough for Cervantes.) After all, you can divide a group of writers into warring camps--or at least into debating teams--by mentioning outlining. Journal keeping doesn't provoke that kind of response. But since considering Brian and John's posts together, I've come to see how fundamental journaling is to my work habits, in part because it makes my outlining possible.

As as aside, I have to say that, like John, I've always enjoyed hearing writers talk about the nuts and bolts of writing. I don't even mind the rare occasions when a writer bangs the podium and insists that there's only one right way to do something. When I hear "this is the way," I always mentally translate it into "this is what works for me." And when I speak to a group of aspiring writers, I always tell them to make the same mental translation if I should pound the podium, though that would be wildly out of character.

As an aside to the last aside, it fascinates me that writers seem to outline or not because of some inherent predisposition. You may be able to influence a few fence sitters, but most writers are firmly in one or the other pasture. Great writers reside on both sides of the fence. My favorite examples are two Southern novelists who happened to be friends, Shelby Foote (outliner) and Walker Percy (non-outliner), and two mystery writers who happen to be friends, Peter Lovesey (outliner) and Michael Z. Lewin (non-outliner). Their photos are reproduced here in the order named. You may notice that the outliners (on the left) appear less stressed and more serene in general. (I refuse to comment on the respective hairlines of the two pairs, but I can't stop you from drawing your own conclusions.)

I start my writing day with my journal, a spiral bound notebook. If I'm at work on a book or a short story, I record my progress from the day before (pat myself on the back) and write about the new day's challenges. From there, if I'm lucky, I move right from the notebook to my latest yellow legal pad and start the actual writing. This priming of the pump or stretching of the writing muscles is one of the things I value most about keeping a journal. It's a non-threatening way to get the pencil moving, a defense against the writer's-block-inducing pressure of writing for posterity right out of bed.

My journal is a writer's block defense in another way, of course. It's a storehouse for book and story ideas. If I'm not writing a book or a story, my journal entry will probably be about a new idea or a reconsideration of an old one. Some ideas demand to be written fairly quickly. Others are improved by "blue skying," a term I picked up from software designers back when I was a technical writer. For me, blue skying is simply kicking an idea around, asking questions like "What if X happens?" or "What would Y do then?" until the story starts to take shape. Brian mentioned that he sometimes writes himself into a corner when he's working on a story. That sometimes happens to me in the idea development process, and this is also when I back out of the corner, if I can. (If I can't, it's on to the next idea and no hard feelings.)

At this point, if the idea is for a short story, I'll probably just write a first draft. For a book idea, I'll next write a step outline, also in my journal. It's just one line for each major event (usually a chapter) of the novel-to-be. This process will be interrupted by more blue skying as I encounter breaks in my plot chain that require new links. Say I'm writing a book for Owen Keane, my ex-seminarian amateur sleuth. My questions to myself will now be "What does Owen believe to be true at this moment?" and "Believing that, what would he do?"

Next, I turn to the legal pad and write an outline--by which I mean a plot summary--cribbing from the plot notes and character sketches in my journal. My mystery novels average around 75,000 words. My plot summary for a book that length will run around 6,000 words. When it's time to write the book, I place the outline in the three-ring binder that will hold my daily pages. Now the outline is not only a prompt to my memory; it's also yet another anti-writer's-block device. I never have to figure out what Keane is going to do on a given day, though I may still have to work out exactly how he'll do it. For example, the outline may only tell me that Owen has to interview the manager of an apartment complex to find out what happens to the belongings of a tenant who skips out (and maybe wheedle access to those belongings). On the day I write that scene, I still have to come up with an interesting setting, cast the part of the manager, and write some deathless repartee. (And make lunch.)

To me, this process answers one of the common criticisms of outlining, which is that it's somehow less creative than simply following one's muse. That might be true if I were getting my outlines from Plots "R" Us or producing them using a complicated formula and a calculator. In reality, I acquire an outline by--gasp--following my muse. I'm just recording a high level or macro view of that muse's traipsing around. In fact, I see outlining as being creative of the macro level and writing the book as being creative on the micro level. But I'm always being creative. (Except when I'm making lunch. If it's turkey on rye on Monday, it's turkey on rye every day that week.)

A second criticism of outlining--one that John mentioned in his post--is harder to answer. It's the fear some non-outliners have that they will lose interest in a story if they know how it ends. Such a writer is motivated by the suspense of not knowing. For a certain type of storyteller, though (and perhaps the Irish are overrepresented in this group), there is something compelling about knowing the story you're telling, knowing where every shock and laugh is, knowing that the payoff is worth the effort of the telling. Think back to some favorite story you love to tell (the one that makes your children or grandchildren elbow each other and roll their eyes or, perhaps, lean forward in anticipation). Writing from a solid outline gives the same kind of satisfaction.

Where I think the chase-the-muse writers may have a true advantage is in the all-important matter of pacing. But that's a subject for another post.

Journaling for Your Work in Progress

Riffing on Rob's terrific post from yesterday on how writing about his novel actually helps him stay creative in the writing of his novel. I think anything you can do during the drafting process that will help you keep your characters/settings/situations/plot fresh and mobile in your mind is going to be of assistance in getting to the finish line with your novel.
This is true of other pieces of work as well, short stories, nonfiction, what have you. And for my money the single most effective way to do all of the above is to journal about your work-in-progress.

Plot diagrams are nice. Character sketches are really important. But for me, I need the internal monologue (and yes, sometimes dialogue) that comes from writing about my writing.

Everyone ought to have a writing journal. If you don't, whatever the format, either Word doc or notebook, you're missing out on something that can help keep your chops sharp and your story in your head. I have notebooks full of entries about the books and short stories I've written. They've been fruitful contributors in a multitude of ways, especially when I hit a dry spell and can't seem to keep my plot moving forward, or once it's stalled, get it rolling again.

That's when I go back to the well. And sometimes re-reading what I've written about my various works-in-progress, even if it bears no fruit at the time, comes back to life when I delve into my oeuvre seeking some sort of fresh idea, some spark to get things rolling again.

Take short stories for example.

I've been known to start one, write myself into a corner, and leave it to work on something else for a while. Then there are the ones I've written that went nowhere when I tried to place them for publication.

Those I set aside too; resolving to re-work them later. One of them ("Suicide Blonde") was written specifically for AHMM, so when Linda Landrigan (rightly) passed on it, I set it aside for a while. And when I journaled about my next work-in-progress, I threw in asides about what ideas I had about re-working "Suicide Blonde" to make it a more successful piece. I also solicited feedback from my critique partners and journaled about their input.

Devoting this sort of headspace to the story (and we're only talking about the amount of time it took to write a few lines per night about it) paid off in the long run. I re-worked the story, submitted it for the MWA themed-anthology contest for that year, don't make that cut, then turned around and re-submitted it to AHMM. This time Linda bought it.

As I've mentioned in previous blog entries I am currently hard at work on an historical mystery novel set in mid-1840s Washington DC. I've done two previous drafts (One full and the other a partial re-write) while trying to work out the plot to my satisfaction. After a couple of false starts I really feel like I'm on the road to completing this novel.

So when a friend recently started up a quarterly e-zine (published electronically and available on Kindle, etc., and a paying venue, to boot) and expressly requested a short story from me, I viewed the notion of writing a short story from scratch, research, etc. (remember, I write historicals. They require a ton  of research!), as a potential distraction, and demurred. He asked again, and he's a good guy and one hell of a writer, so it's an honor to be asked.

Plus, I'd reached a slow-down patch in my novel, so I shifted gears and went back to the notebooks, and dug up an idea I'd initially had for a short story featuring Renaissance Italian adventurers attempting to break the ultimate political prisoner out of the Turkish sultan's toughest prison in 1580s Constantinople.

And I began to journal.

I had a couple of false starts to fall back on (I keep all of my "didn't make the cut" drafts, so I can "cannibalize" anything useful in later work. After all, no need to re-thread the needle if you've already done it before!), plus a fair bit of notes from my research (my story idea was based on actual events).

I finished the final draft of that short story last night, putting the final touches to it after receiving feedback on the rough draft I pounded out based on my previous notes/drafts and the  pages I devoted to the journaling process and writing about my writing.

And while it's true that sometimes setting aside a good story until you can get all of its parts working right in your head (and that usually takes time, in this case, years!), I couldn't have pulled together all the complex threads for this story and developed them in 8,000 words had I not written about what I was writing: my process, my ideas for fleshing out the story. What worked, what didn't, and so on.

So there you have it. Want to finish a writing project? Well then get to journaling!

Brian