ART UK

THE ART OF DETECTION goes on sale today in England. This dawned on me yesterday, when one of my husband’s nurses mentioned the date and I realized that I’d intended to be driving across Europe today in the car I’d ordered, bound for England and a series of events there.

Poisoned Pen Press are great people who do great books. They’re small, down-to-earth, professional, easy to work with. And they’re just getting started in the UK. I feel terrible about having to cancel the tour for them, I had so looked forward to the events they set up for me, but my life is not my own at the moment, so the book will appear without its author.

Can I ask a favor—or rather, a favour? If you live in the UK, would you buy a copy? I ask you not for me, but to support a great new publishing venture. You’ll probably have to order it—the ISBN number is 1-84722-000-2—but by way of thanks, if you send me your address, we’ll send you a signed bookplate. You can find my mailing address at the bottom of the web site’s home page.

Best-laid plans

I had hoped I would have better news for those of you in Europe who were hoping to have a LRK sighting this year, but my husband’s perilous state of health means I’m going to have to cancel the UK leg of the September tour, and probably cancel the Italian conference as well. And I was really looking forward to both.

Noel had a stroke the first part of July, and in the course of treating it they discovered that he had stomach cancer. He’s now had the surgery and was recovering from both, although setbacks and chronic uncertainty seem to be a daily—or hourly—part of life around here. And I can’t see taking off for a month right at the moment.

I presume we will simply reschedule the events, either for next spring or the summer.

As far as I know, I’ll be able to make it to BoucherCon the end of September, and to the Chicago event the day before the conference begins.

Thanks to all of you who expressed concern and good wishes. He’s due to come home from the hospital in a couple days, and without spending four or five hours a day on hospital visits, I may be able to pick up TOUCHSTONE again.

Shot at dawn

Something I try to do with my novels is tie them in to a larger picture—O JERUSALEM pokes around the realization that, if the British had done things differently during the Mandate, we might have a different set of problems in the Middle East today; WITH CHILD confronts the terrible way we as a society just lose kids through the cracks.

In JUSTICE HALL I made use of a bit of British history that was shocking during the Great War, and shockingly unfinished into the present. 306 young men (mostly enlisted men--officers, you will be astonished to hear, were given a more generous treatment) who had their minds battered by the unrelenting horror that was trench warfare broke under the strain. This happens in every war, and we treat them. Except in the Great War, the first time any of that technology had been used, broken minds and nerves were called cowardice, and the men were hauled in front of a wall at dawn and shot.

And they were never pardoned. Through years of efforts on the part of families and those simply interested in justice, work was done,, but time and again, the British government refused to hear the cause.

Until this week.

Des Browne, the Minister for Defence, yesterday announced that the Government will now amend the Armed Forces Bill due to be debated in the House of Lords in October. The amendment will grant posthumous pardons to the 306 soldiers who were executed in the Great War.

Read about it on the Shot at Dawn site linked to above, and here.

Their families, at last, may rest in peace.

The Rewrite, again

Back at the beginning of the month, a pair of (anonymous) questions regarding craft came in: How much of a biography do you give secondary characters before introducing them into a novel? And, Do you write around themes, or do the themes emerge as you tell yourself the story?

Both of these boil down to the rewrite process. The rough-and-tumble of a first draft sees the introduction of all kinds of ideas and all sorts of characters. It’s the preliminary sketch period, when broad lines are drawn and details are a little sparse. In other words, I’m not sure what is a secondary character or what the themes are until I can see the shape of the entire book, beginning to end, and judge what it is and what it needs.

Some secondary characters are only there to advance the flow of action, like rocks in a Japanese stream: It’s best to have interesting shapes, but they can’t be too dominant because their role is part of the flow, not central feature. Sometimes this means paring down their more interesting qualities in order to let them fade a bit.

Other times something sharp and quirky is needed, and even though a character is of little importance in the ultimate scheme of things, the flow needs a quick jog in order to keep the reader’s attention.

Similarly with themes. Although I have to admit, I’m not exactly positive what the themes are in a book. I know some of the ideas I’m trying to work with—for example, in THE GAME I was playing up the parallel between the 1920s and now when it comes to the political quagmire of Afghanistan and northern India, as I shaped O JERUSALEM around the clear link between the actions of the British Mandate and the mess in Israel today. I suppose those parallels are thematic. But what is the theme of WITH CHILD? That some kids are hugely screwed by society, yet manage to survive intact? So? That hardly seems worth writing an entire novel in order to say.

I’d be curious to know what people see as the themes in some of my books, and perhaps I could respond to those.

A word about letters

I’ll go back to the Q&A later, but I wanted first to say something about the letters I get.

Because I don’t generally give out my email address, those who want to write me either have to take their luck with this blog’s comments department, or sit down and put ink on paper, address it to me (which address is at the bottom of my site’s home page, for all to see) and dig out a stamp with some stick to it. And in the fullness of time, sometimes months later, a reply will find its way from me to the writer.

Mostly. I do get the occasional postcard-too-casual-to-return-address, which is fine, and I’m afraid my sleuthing skills have failed a handful of times when it came to deciphering the scribble jammed into one corner of the envelope. And then there are those that deliberately leave off addresses.

Those break my heart, really they do. That poor lady in her eighties (with arthritis, to judge by her writing) who took me to task for failing her with FOLLY, when she had been led to believe that here, at last, was a writer who could be trusted not to curse, only to get to page whatever of the book and have her mortal eyes offended by my taking of the Lord’s name in vain. (I’d actually pretty sure that Russell swears from time to time, but perhaps this lady’s mortal eyes were already beginning to fail when she got to those passages.)

I could never write to apologize for my offense, because she remained anonymous, and forever stung by the bitter disappointment of LRK’s duplicity. I can only hope she got her money back at the store.

But then there are the other letters that leave me, well, puzzled. For example:

Dear Mrs. King,
[Mrs? I always think of Mrs. King as my mother-in-law.]
Until earlier this year, I was blissfully unaware of the chronicles of Mary Russell, but that state was permanently ended when I purchased “The Beekeeper’s Apprentice” at a 3-for-the-price-of-2 sale at my local Borders store. Since then, with the help of my local public library, I have finished reading all of the Mary Russell novels. I must confess that they have a certain charm, despite the (generally) paper-thin plots and the preponderance of lesbian characters.
[So at this point in my reading of her letter I’m thinking, Well, the writer has an Indian name, maybe it’s that her grasp of English isn’t terribly subtle? I mean, to be blissfully unaware of these books with paper thin plots and too many lesbians (although I have to wonder which Russells she’s been reading, that she found lesbians so thick underfoot) is an appropriate beginning for a scathing letter, but when one goes from reluctantly accepting a free book to actively seeking out the series in the library, it indicates a certain affection, does it not?]

The reader then goes on to praise my theological subtlety, congratulate me [?] on remaining uninvolved with the Dan Brown plagiarism case, and correct a transliteration from THE GAME, finally ending by saying cheerfully that she’s looking forward to more of the series, including the “inevitable” revelation that James Bond was Russell’s son and Mycroft the original M.

You see why this letter has sat on my desk, so long unanswered? Where does one begin? Should my reply take an apologetic tone, or one of thanks?

I’m so confused.

August Q&A 4

Q: Melissa gets us going on a discussion of nuts-and-bolts: How does a publishing contract work? How much (if any) freedom have you lost as far as what you write? At what point are you locked into a story idea? Have you ever had to finish writing something that you wanted to take in a completely different direction but could not because someone else’s money was invested in your original idea?

A: Publishing is an industry. This may sound self-evident—and the more you know about how it works, the more self-evident it is. Men and women are in it to make money, for themselves and their investors, and can’t afford to squander resources on losing prospects.

The problem comes with the question, What do we mean by a losing prospect? Because this is an industry that rests, not on a bedrock of manufacturing cars, selling pills, or lending money, but on an art form. Like rare stamps, a piece of art is worth precisely what someone will pay for it. Both a Monet and your cousin’s painting of her dog are nothing more than pigment on canvas. Who says one is worth more than the other?

The acquiring editor’s job is to know which of the fifty manuscripts she reads this week will cause people to fork over twenty-five dollars for a hardback, or seven for a paperback. Her job, and the reason she’s slowly made her way up in the company from starving-wage assistant through baby editor to someone able to pay large chunks of the company’s cash for a raw manuscript is because her guesses have proven better than the guesses of others.

The funny thing is, this editor is also a person who adores books, who has personal tastes and preferences that don’t always (don’t usually, in my experience) agree with the taste of the great reading public. She would love to be able to hand over $250,000 to a gem of a writer who’s never going to sell more than 10,000 copies of that gorgeous, quirky little book, but she knows that if she does that too many times, she’s out of a job. Publishing is an industry, not a patron of the arts or donor of MacArthur grants for writers.

However, the industry does leave a little bit of wiggle room for itself (and for the sanity of its editors, who really need to be able to look at themselves in the mirror without loathing.) So it gives brownie points for starred reviews and prizes. People who get those don’t always hit the NYTimes list, but they bring honor to the house, and if that’s not quite as good as DaVinci Code numbers, it’s worth something.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that the editor’s preferences with that book you’re writing are not reached lightly. When I enter into a contract with a publishing house, I am agreeing not only to the specified word count and the due date, but to giving them more or less what they have come to expect. If you are under contract for a mystery novel and halfway into it, realize it would be much better as a romance, that’s a problem.

Sometimes, a conversation with the editor—if she’s a good editor, willing to listen to your concerns and as interested in making a good book as she is making sales—will give a direction that embraces the needs of both sides, and you’ll happily finish your romantic suspense novel without undue angst.

Other times, compromise isn’t possible. Maybe she sees an abrupt change a really bad idea in terms of building your career; maybe you can’t bear the idea of any suspense in your romance; maybe she’s under enormous pressure from the bottom line and simply can’t extend you the freedom you need. This is when you have to decide whether to bite the bullet and finish the book they’re expecting, or to put this book aside and work on one more to their needs, or even to buy yourself out of the contract entirely and take your publishing business elsewhere.

I personally have been very fortunate in the amount of freedom my publishers have given me. I’ve never yet had an editor demand that I change something I saw as essential to the book, and I’ve always found my editors’ suggestions extremely helpful in building the book.

If I wanted to write something entirely different, something my mainstream publishing house might not be too enthusiastic about, I would probably write it first, and then offer it around. Same way if I didn’t have any idea what it was going to be, if it was a book so nebulous and/or experimental that it was impossible to describe in advance. My usual publishers might, in the end, buy it, just to keep me in-house, although the money and promotional efforts wouldn’t be great. Or I could take it to another house, a small house perhaps, where the freedom would be greater, the risks smaller, and large reward would be about as likely as being struck by lightning on the tundra.

August Q&A 3

Let’s talk research—with three related questions:

WDI (and thanks for the card) asks: How do you research speech patterns and dialect? I was struck with this while re-reading The Moor. I understand that "place" and "time" can be straightforward to research (at least in the obvious ways); but how the heck do you manage the dialects, vocabulary, and cadences of speech in the different times/places/characters?

Elizabeth asks: Do you have an idea of what you want the book to be about and then do the research, or does the idea for the book come from doing the research and having some detail spark you interest?

And from Erika: when you're writing fiction about an actual place, like San Francisco or the San Juans, how much of an overlay of fictional detail do you create to keep it in the realm of the genre?
(She also wants to know, Is Tyler's Road and Tyler's Creek an actual place? My answer is, the map shows an area geographically similar, and twenty years ago when I wrote the book there was a hippie community up there, but after that it’s all LRK.)

So, research.

I know the parameters of the book before I write it, because I write under contract. This means I’ve worked out with my editor, a year or two in advance, whether the book is going to be a Russell, a Martinelli, or a stand-alone, and if the latter, then what kind—contemporary or historical?

So going into the book I’ll have certain things set by way of characters, setting, time. But within those limitations, the choices are broad. Who is the focus of this book? What is the flavor I want to aim at—dark or light? And—and here’s where the question of preliminary research comes in—what events or people or situations can I find that support what I want to do with the book? Note that I don’t say, What events etc do I want to write about? In THE MOOR, the presence of Sabine Baring-Gould near Dartmoor was an untold blessing for my purposes, but in the end, the book is not about Baring-Gould. And in the current long-suffering TOUCHSTONE, the story is set in the weeks leading up to the General Strike in England, but in the novel, that country’s 1926 brush with revolution is as much metaphor as it is central concern.

However, once chosen, an event or person must be researched to within an inch of its life. I change things, yes, but it is almost always with malice aforethought and not through ignorance. “My” Sabine Baring-Gould is more active than the old man would in fact have been, three months before his death, but I figured he was more interesting active than near-comatose, and I am writing fiction. I read closely the biographies, the autobiography, and a ton of the man’s writings, and then I took him and changed him slightly to meet the needs of fiction. The same with “my” version of Dashiell Hammett in LOCKED ROOMS, and the brief appearance of TE Lawrence in O JERUSALEM, when actually he was busy in Paris.

The same goes with places. Writing San Francisco, I make sure I get the one-way streets right (now, THAT is a challenge) and I don’t move monuments such as the Ferry Building or Chinatown. But I’m quite free to add neighborhood coffeehouses or buildings that don’t quite exist, but should, or to stick in the odd island to the San Juan chain rather than stealing someone else’s on which to plant my FOLLY.

However, in order to change something, I need to know it, and so I spend some time in the San Juans to learn the shape and feel of the islands that exist in this space-time continuum, and hike the Sussex Downs to get a sense of the terrain and the people.

As for dialects, it’s amazing what you can learn from books (and probably online, although I haven’t explored.) I have several on English accents and dialects, and I try to read the relevant parts before I go to, say, Wales or Cornwall, so I know what I’m hearing.

As I’ve said before, I tend to do the research in two parts. The first, before writing, gives me the flavor and general feeling of the time and place; the second part, done after the first draft is written, goes after the specific details that I was unsure about as I was writing, but didn’t want to pause to hunt down. Because I don’t know exactly what I’m going to need until I know what direction the book goes in, and because I’m a recovering academic who so easily falls back into bad habits, trying to do every bit of potential research before writing the book would mean I’d either shape the book around the interesting facts I uncover, ignoring the story itself, or else I’d never write the book because the research proved so fascinating, I disappeared into the library stacks, never to emerge.

August Q&A 2

Thanks, Kay, for asking:
How do you approach a rewrite? Do all the suggestions come from your editor, or do you have second, or additional thoughts about the first draft?

A: The last few times I’ve been asked to do a presentation at one writing conference or another, I’ve chosen to do one on The Art of the Rewrite. And if I ever write a how-to book, it’ll be called just that.

The first draft is all about passion, excitement, exploration. Every character is thrilling, every plot twist is a thing never before seen in fiction, every setting is vital and immediate: the air in the book has never been breathed before.

That’s the mad flush of a first draft, and if it sounds as if I’m talking about an illicit affair, then I’ve captured the sensation. No room for doubt, no critical glances, no desire to do anything but think about the object of your desire.

But if you’re considering the long term for this fling, sooner or later you need to stand back and think about how to reshape the affair into a marriage.

Which is when you realize that every character in the book is much like the next, that the plot twists are either tired or nonsensical, the settings are incompletely constructed. You send the manuscript to your long-suffering editor with a cover letter that protests its roughness and unsuitability for her eyes, and she looks at it and agrees that it needs some work. You take a deep breath from the stale air that emanates from the stack of pages, and dig in.

Normally, as I go through the first draft, the small voice of the Critic on my shoulder mutters doubts. I dutifully write those doubts and questions down, and ignore most of them. But when I’ve finished the raw first draft, when I’ve crawled out of my writing cave, blinking and myopic, and restored the house and my life to some sort of order, when I’ve reestablished my presence in the lives of friends and family, I return to the manuscript, with the list of criticisms pinned to the board in front of me.

These are the big, thematic questions, that more or less boil down to: Does this make sense? And if the answer to that question is, No, it doesn’t, then I have to see how to go about dragging the plot, the characters, the themes back into line. Chapters are sliced and shifted, pages inserted with notes that tell me what I need to establish at this place in order to have the story unfold properly. Unwritten chapters—those that I’ve just typed the chapter number and a few notes—are either fleshed out or scrapped, if the material I vaguely thought would need to go there turns out to be not really necessary, or else already included elsewhere.

And if this sounds a ridiculous amount of work to you, like retiling your bath three times because you can’t decide which color works best, then you’re probably someone who outlines. I’d like to know before I write just where the book is going, it would make this part of my live enormously easier, but that simply isn’t how my head works.

As an illustration, the other day my sister bought some Chinese Broccoli at the farmer’s market, sort of a cross between broccoli rabe and kale. I’d never cooked it before, but I stir-fried the stalks with a bunch of garlic and added the chopped leaves and when they were done, I tasted it. Nice and bitter, but monochromatic. So I added a handful of dried currents for a sweet note, and a few pine nuts for visual and texture contrast, and it was perfect.

And that’s how I write. Only the writing goes a lot more slowly than stir fry.

August Q&A 1

Q: L. Crampton weighs in with a question that may be a good place to begin: My wonder-about is, what role writing plays when the rest of your life is demanding, as July was for you. I tend to feel most 'anchored' when writing well daily, but when my mom was ill for a couple of years and dying last year, I couldn't seem to settle to writing unless there was a penalty for not doing so.
I write best when times are neither Too Good (too much fun to be had) nor Too Bad. Goldielocksish, I suppose.

A: Once upon a time, I was writing my first book that had been sold before it was written. TO PLAY THE FOOL drew on ideas that I had worked on years before in my undergraduate thesis on the Holy Fool, in this case, fleshing out the archetype of the Fool and setting him down in San Francisco. Among other challenges, I decided that my Fool needed to speak entirely in quotes.

And then my mother, who lived in a separate house next to ours, stepped off some stairs in a darkened theater and broke both her wrists. While my husband was off in China. And my sister had various obligations that made it tough to take over much of the feeding/dressing/caring duties. A person with plaster from fingers to armpit on both arms can’t do very much for herself.

So my life became: Get up. Get kids and mother up, fed, dressed. Run kids to school. Spend day looking for snippets of Shakespeare and the Bible that fitted what the fictional Fool wanted to say, alternating by running next door in response to the jury-rigged doorbell my mother could use when she needed something. Pick up kids, run out to check that the garden wasn’t dying, take deep breath. Cook dinner, put everyone to bed, go to bed, wake up a couple of times to help my mother, catch sleep in between, and the next morning start again. I could make it to the grocery store in ten minutes, but I’d be home in 45, just in case, envisioning my mother in need.

You’d think the book would have suffered, if not completely fizzled and died, but oddly, the utter immersion of the writing task made it the only thing that kept me sane for the five weeks and three days (but who’s counting?) until her short casts went on. The utterly focused hours I was bent over my writing pad, or fossicking through Bartlett’s for nuggets that could be turned to my purpose, kept my mind from the frustrating madness of those weeks, when I was the only fit adult in view.

This time is different, in many ways. Part of it is the amount of support I have, no longer being locked into the solitary life of a young mother. But that is countered by the enormous amount of stuff I have to do in the course of sorting out my husband’s treatment—this week alone I will see three doctors, two physical therapists, and make a trip with him to the hospital to get blood drawn. A writer can—must—be able to take a certain amount of distraction in the course of a day, but at a point, and particularly when each distraction requires attention and follow-up, work gets pushed further and further back on the stove. I am, as regular readers of the blog may recall, in the rewrite phase of TOUCHSTONE, but I’ve already told my editor that she’s not getting the book anywhere near when I said.

Maybe it's because I'm 53 now instead of 38, and there's just that much less of an energy store to draw from. Or perhaps because I've been a professional for all these years, the thrill of the job isn't enough to drive me on. Or it could be simply that the attention required of a rewrite is both more demanding and less enthralling than that of a first draft.

In any case, I grab an hour here and two hours there, and it progresses, albeit slowly. And each time I pick it up, I do remember what the book was about and what I've been trying to do, which I take as a good sign. The book is worth doing, I will finish it and make it good, just not quite as quickly as I would have without the current trials.

(Oh, and one of the cats needs to go to the vet’s. But he’ll just have to live until next week, sorry.)