Archive for the ‘Writing Process’ Category

There are two reasons for that question. The first is, that’s what I ask myself when I wake up in the middle of the night and realize I have to fix a fatal flaw in my writing. The second is, this time anyway, the timing in the story is what woke me up.

Some authors carry the concept of time in their books to extremes. Like in Wuthering Heights or Great Expectations, story plots spread out across decades while characters brood and pine, wringing their hands in abject frustration as they stare out across the bleak, depressing moors. Great stories, but as a writer, I just don’t have that kind of patience. Michael Crichton’s novel, Airframe, had the entire book take place in 24 hours. That is also a great story, but then the focus has to be all about the action without a lot of time for emoting or inner monologue.

Both Book 1 and Book 2 in my Dairlyland Murders series had the majority of the action take place in about a week. Time is still an entity I struggle with. Some things have to take place in a specific time frame, like the decomposition of a body. Time can also make readers squirm, “Oh crap! Is he (or she) going to get there before it’s too late?” And all around the stuff the reader takes for granted is me trying to choreograph my twisted neighborhood of make-believe into something that runs smoothly through the illusion of time.

In the second book, I thought I had everything timed perfectly. Then I sent it out to my editors. One editor (and one of my best friends of twenty-some odd years) fixated on one word, one little adjective, and threw the entire first quarter of the book into a tailspin. The word was “waning”, referring to the sun, as the time of day was in the afternoon. This was bad because the editor pointed out that there was still a whole bunch of stuff that took place, and she was not convinced it could be accomplished in the time I had allotted. She was right, and it was all over one barely acknowledged word that I casually threw in from my vocabulary.

Now in the third book, I’m approaching an important action scene, and I woke up in the middle of the night (4:12am to be precise), and thought: “Oh crap! It’s Deer Season in the book. I have to work in that schedule… People are working in a public school. How do I fit vacation in, or Thanksgiving? I was going to have this catastrophic piece of action take place at this time, but I’m a day too early. So do I work the sex scene in before? Because I was going to drag out the tension on that for a couple more days, but I can’t because the consequences of the action scene are going to drag out, then that’ll throw the sex scene off; it won’t make sense…”

Maybe if I just drop everyone in a worm hole and send them to Victorian England to wander out on the moors for a while…

This sounds like a silly question to me, but our puritanical society is so much more comfortable with the immorality of violence than the natural (usually) biological urge to procreate, that I do get asked that question on occasion. I will attempt to answer it. I will be blushing while I type.

The simpler answer is because I like to write about people having sex. It’s fun. It’s a guilty pleasure for me, just like it’s probably a guilty pleasure for my readers. Unlike the scary dark places I have to go to in my head to create cunning killers and creepy crime scenes, I get to imagine attractive (at least in my head; you have your own fetishes) people and their naked body parts in all their glory.

We are blessed as homosapians to come in so many varieties and still be the same species. The human body itself is a vast pallet of colors and textures, volumes and masses, and when it’s aroused, everything changes in preparation for intercourse. I find it fascinating to describe those changes and the emotional buildup to the climax. If you think that’s dirty, you’re reading the wrong book.

I also write about sex because I like adding a romantic aspect to my characters. Sexual tension is exciting, but the relationship is really the meat of the story. It’s the glue that holds the series together from case to case, murder to murder if you will.

Will the characters ever be happy? Will they ever be able to get together? Especially in the case of my main characters, their entire relationship is built on the addictive passion they feel toward each other. My readers want them to be together. They want them to get to that happy ending, and the more difficult I make that goal to attain, the hotter the sex gets. Supply and demand.

And I would be lying if I didn’t acknowledge just a little bit that sex does sell, but I refuse to believe it is the end all to be all of my stories. There is no formula in my head as to when people have sex; I don’t have some sort of Boinking Quota in mind. The characters have sex when it seems right to me. There’s a time for body count and a time for orgasms. In my books, you get both. What more could you ask for? Zombies? No! I have to draw the line somewhere.

I wrote some more for book 3 yesterday.  I hand-wrote about six pages on a small notepad that I normally use for grocery lists, not having a trusty spiral notebook at home, so it should come out to about a page and a half typed. It was an insightful look into one of the antagonists.

Then, this morning as I’m in the bathroom, you know…thinking, another completely different creative story comes to me. All different characters, an interesting and relative topic, new twists and turns, so many consequences to this one main character’s obsession to see his life’s work amount to something….Ooh, it’s so tempting. Where would it start? I would have to do research on that!

It’s like being happily married and you’re out with your spouse somewhere doing something relatively mundane, and a very attractive person of the opposite sex walks past you, gives you a sidelong, come-hither glance, and you are so captivated that your spouse has to physically accost you to get your attention.

Writing a book, like being happily married, requires commitment. Both are not going to be new and exciting all the time. Both need to be nurtured and paid attention to. Both can be a struggle to maintain and continue for the long haul. When anything worth while gets to a point where it becomes a challenge to continue forward, it’s easy to get distracted by new stuff. None of us are that far from the toddler whose attention can be swayed by a new toy.

It’s OK. Acknowledge the distraction. Glean from it what you will (“Look, Honey, your doppelganger just walked by”). Then get back to work. Nothing worth having is ever easy.