August 2007 Archives

It was hard to tear ourselves away this morning, but it's good to be home with my boys: John, Keeper and Jet. There are distractions  all over my desk, though. Ugh. Here are some of the pictures from our productive trip. This poster  hung directly above my desk. How could I not be inspired to work??         The day of our arrival was Margaret Maron's birthday, so after going out to dinner, we surprised her with her favorite: carrot cake. That's Brenda Witchger to the right. The Weymouth House is full of fascinating rooms, large and small. Below is the spirit-filled library where writers are annually inducted into the NC Literary Hall of Fame. Their pictures hang on the walls. F Scott Fitzgerald, Maxwell Parrish and many other famous writers spent time at the house. The desk in the corner had (reportedly) been used by Abraham Lincoln. This is the room where we met during the day to set goals and brainstorm. Katy and I tried to make contact with the house ghost last night in this room, with some spooky success. Here we are enjoying an Italian dinner. From left, that's Brenda Witchger, Margaret Maron, Katy Munger, me and Sarah Shaber. And here we are at the Southern Pines Library where we spoke on Sunday. From left, Katy Munger, Alex Sokoloff, local thriller author JD Rhoades who showed up to give us support, me, Brenda Witchger and Sarah Shaber. There are a carriage house and stables on the Weymouth property, where horses are trained to pull carriages. As I was leaving this morning, I spotted these gorgeous horses being put through their paces. Aren't they stunning? Well, speaking of pace. . . I'm hoping to keep up the pace I set at Weymouth, but it's not as easy when there's a stack of bills on my desk and laundry in the laundry room. . . not to mention ready Internet access and TV. John taped Design Star and Big Love for me, so I guess I'll get back to work tomorrow. . .

Well, we are having a FANTASTIC and incredibly productive time here at the mansion! The only difficult thing is not being able to get online easily, since the old computer in the writers' study is dial up, but we're grateful to be able to check our email at all. I can't upload the pictures I've been taking on this computer, though, so I'll add them when I get home tomorrow afternoon. There are five of us here: Margaret Maron, Brenda Witchger, Sarah Shaber, Katy Munger and myself. Alexandra Sokoloff was with us for the first few days, but she's touring now. The Weymouth Center for the Arts, for those who don't know, allows published North Carolina writers to stay here for free. I was here for a few days last fall, but I'd forgotten how conducive it is to working. There are NO distractions, especially since it's too hot to do much walking through the gardens. No TV or radio and, as I mentioned, very limited Internet access. There are, however, spacious rooms filled with books of NC writers present and past. Right above my desk in my charming bedroom is an inspirational poster (photo coming!) of the "NC Women of Letters." I love looking at all the wonderful faces and knowing I share a love a writing with every one of them. We quickly settled into a working rhythm, thanks to Sarah's firm hand. Upon arrival the first afternoon, we gathered in the beautiful library (where the NC Writers' Hall of Fame inductees watched us from the walls), and each of us announced our goals for the stay, as well as our goals for that afternoon. We repeat that process each day, meeting again at five to give a progress report. After checking in with our progress, we begin brainstorming. Whoever needs help describes the snag she's encountered, and the ideas fly through the air, with one person madly taking notes to give to the writer-in-need.  Everyone has done very well, turning out pages galore. I probably won't meet my final goal of having a complete rough synopsis of my next book, but I will have the central storyline sketched out, so I'm happy about that. Once home, I'll add in the subplots. Sunday afternoon, we took a break from our writing to speak to a super audience at the Southern Pines Library. Local thriller writer JD Rhoades showed up with his son, Nick, to give us moral support. The audience was mostly mystery readers, since my fellow authors write in that genre, but I hope they'll give my books a try since most of them have mystery, suspense or intrigue in them in addition to a focus on relationships. I can't believe this is our last full day here. We leave tomorrow morning and then its back to reality. I hope I can take a little of the writing discipline I've found here home with me.  

If you've followed my blog for awhile, you might remember my solo trip last year to the Weymouth House, where I was a writer-in-residence for nearly a week. It was fantastic to have that writing time to myself, though I did get a little antsy with the solitude toward the end. (On the Myers-Briggs personality test, I'm exactly in the middle between "Introvert" and "Extrovert). Anyway, I'm returning there for another residency on Saturday--this time with several fellow writers-- for a few days of brainstorming storylines, tweaking characters and furious scribbling. Five of us are speaking at the library in Southern Pines on Sunday afternoon, so if you're in the area, please join us. Here's the article from the local paper. The other writers and I have emailed back and forth about what we're bringing to eat. Not anything about what we're writing mind you--we have our priorities straight. :) The one food item all our lists have in common is coffee. We plan to be awake as much as possible so we can get tons done! Can't wait!

I finished reading SECRET LIVES about one am this morning. As I mentioned a few posts ago, SECRET LIVES was my third book and the first where I felt I was truly hitting my stride. It's been more than fifteen years since I read that book and it was full of surprises for me--not in the story itself, of course, but in terms of how I've changed as a novelist. . . and how I've stayed the same. What's changed?

• There is a very strong romantic thread (actually two of them) throughout this book. For many years, I believed you couldn't have a terrific story without a romantic thread. My mistake was in equating "romance" with "relationship." Now I believe you can't have a terrific story without a strong relationship. At least one character needs to care deeply about another, whether it be a lover, a mother, a brother, a child. The relationship doesn't need to be a romance for the story to soar.
• In exploring that romance, I fell into the formulaic trap of: attraction and joy, followed by conflict and misery, followed by joy forever. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with  unfolding a romance in that way; it often happens that way in real life (and the second romantic thread in SL does not end with joy forever. . . ). What bothered me as a reader was that it felt too transparent. Or maybe the thirty-something characters simply feel too young to me now. Perhaps I've grown jaded over the years.
• Speaking of which: this was one juicy book! There are several love scenes and every one of them is graphic to the max. I rarely write a graphic love scene anymore. I try to write only what is necessary to move the plot forward and/or develop character. I leave the rest behind the bedroom door. Is that change because of my development as a writer or my aging as a woman? LOL. Maybe a bit of both.
• My writing is more spare now. As I read SECRET LIVES, I picked out many unnecessary sentences--and some unnecessary paragraphs. I really clobbered the reader over the head a few times to drive home a point. I tend to trust my reader more these days.
• Oodles of four letter words! Even though I believe they fit the characters who spoke them, I am more cautious in using them these days.

What hasn't changed?

• Characterization. It's always been my strong suit and the characters in SECRET LIVES are, in my humble opinion, very much alive. My favorite review of SECRET LIVES was from The Washington Post, in which the reviewer called the characters "decent, complex and believable." I still like to write about people who, like those characters, have integrity.
• Themes of forgiveness, loss, and redemption, which I seem to revisit in nearly every book.
• Emotional power. I cried at one am when I hit the chapter in which . . . well, I'll simply say that I cried when I wrote it and fifteen years later, it still worked for me.
• Secrets. I loved them then and I love them now. They have the power to both devastate and--once revealed--to heal. 
• Complicated storyline. Complex tales are murder to write, but what a joy they are to read!
• The past informs the present. Sometimes my stories move back and forth between the past and the present, as happens in SECRET LIVES through Kate's journal. We're all the product of our past, and I love figuring out how my characters came to be the people they are.
• Phobias and other psychological conditions. As a former agoraphobic and former therapist, I often write about people who struggle with their fears. I like to believe that Kate would have overcome hers in SECRET LIVES . . . if it hadn't been for that chapter that made me cry. :(
• Settings that are evocative. I'll never be able to duplicate the power of the setting in SECRET LIVES: a limestone cavern in the Shenandoah Valley. Still, I look at my settings from an emotional perspective. They are always a little dark around the edges, no matter how brightly the sun is shining.
• Love, and lots of it. I want it flowing in every direction from nearly every character. It may sometimes be hard for them to express or hidden beneath layers of hurt, but it's still there.
• A satisfying ending. I don't need happy-ever-after, but if I ask my readers to give me hours of their time, I want them to have a reward at the end.

I guess it's a bit strange that I've spent so much time discussing a book that is unavailable! (Check your libraries if you're interested). Still, it's been enlightening to me as a writer to look back at how much I've changed. . . and how much I've stayed the same. If you're a writer, I hope some of the discussion helped you. And if you're one of my beloved readers, thank you for taking this journery with me. 

I've learned to pay attention to my dreams ever since my early writing days when I realized how closely they reflected my feelings about my work. Last night I dreamt that I was on Topsail Island, caught in Hurricane Roberto. (Very weird side note! I just Googled Hurricane Roberto and discovered it was a category 5 hurricane that did enormous damage in Palixia. Now, I admit to being pathetic when it comes to geography, but Palixia? So I googled Palixia and found a ton of information on a country I've never heard of. But something just didn't ring right. . . For example, the site states that The name Palixia is believed to come from the Spootopolion word pal icks, which means "freaky".  Finally, my googling took me to a site which identified Palixia as a country in a "free nation simulation game," in which online players create their own countries, complete with economic, military, social--and yes, meteorological--histories. Wow, do I feel duped!) So, anyway, I was swept into the ocean by Hurricane Roberto. It was  frightening. The waves were massive and coming at me from all directions. I knew I needed to swim toward shore. The problem was, I didn't know which direction to swim in, since I couldn't see land at all.  The dream reflects perfectly my current state of mind. I have three important things I need to work on. 1) The sequel to BEFORE THE STORM, which I'm currently calling, AFTER THE STORM; 2) Revisions on BEFORE THE STORM; and 3) promotional tasks related to the paperback release of THE SECRET LIFE OF CEECEE WILKES at the end of the year. Every morning, I wake up uncertain which of these three to focus on and I'm tossed back and forth between them the way the sea tossed me during Hurricane Roberto. When I work on one, I feel as if I should be working on another. So instead of working on any of the above, I Googled what to do in a hurricane, searching for symbolic insight. I think I found it:

• Avoid using the phone, except for serious emergencies. (I think they mean email in my case. . . )
• Go to your safe room. (Aha! I have not been spending enough time writing at Starbucks lately!) 
• Take refuge in a small interior room or closet (Okay, I'll go to the little Starbucks.)
• Lie on the floor under a table. (Uh, no. They already think I'm weird enough at Starbucks).

I think I just got the answer! Clearly my dream didn't take place either before or after the storm, but rather during it. So I shouldn't work on the revisions or on the sequel, but on the promotional material, and that will be my focus tomorrow morning. At Starbucks.  

Yup, I'm talking about those four letter words. And maybe a few with more than four letters. What's a writer to do? I know I've discussed this before, but it's time to revisit the topic. Last week, I received an email from a woman who was enjoying THE BAY AT MIDNIGHT until she got to page 249 and discovered one of those words. (I've tried to respond to her email, but her address was incorrect, so I hope she's a reader of the blog). I hate offending my readers! Over the years, I've heard from quite a few who've taken the time to let me know that, while they love my stories, they get upset when they stumble across a curse word or when a character "takes the Lord's name in vain." This is a tough one for me. I always listen to my readers. If they take the time to email or write to me, I know I've touched them in some way and I need to pay attention. I've never been big on using four letter words in my novels, and I've learned to ask myself "is this word really necessary here?" Most of the time, it's not. Sometimes, in my opinion, it is. Back to page 249 in THE BAY AT MIDNIGHT. For those of you who've read the book, remember Bruno? He was the character from 1962 who was a sexy, wild bad boy. After eight-year-old Lucy has an accident on her bike, he says to her: "You &%$ed up your bike pretty good." Ned, his friend, then says, "Hey! Cool the language." Julie, our twelve-year-old first person narrator then tells us: I was both shocked and thrilled by his use of the forbidden word. . . To my way of thinking, this was an appropriate use of a four letter word. The exchange showed the reader something about three of the characters: Bruno's crass enough to cuss in front of young girls. Ned is protective of them. And Julie, while shocked, feels a secret excitement at a peek into the world of a much older, much wilder, adolescent. On the other hand, I could have found another way of handling the scene that wouldn't have offended this, or any other, reader. I don't think it would have had the impact, though. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of speaking on a panel at Cameron Village Library in Raleigh. The topic was on writing suspense and I was joined by Suzanne Adair who writes young adult historicals, PM Terrell, who writes thrillers featuring female computer programmers (really!) and Virginia Kantra, who writes romantic suspense. It was a very dynamic discussion and before we knew it, two hours had flown by. We all write very different types of books, yet suspense is an important element in all our work. Every novel needs to hold the reader captive. If it can keep a reader up all night, unable to put the book down, so much the better! We talked about the importance of well-developed characters and intriguing relationships as well. All the suspense in the world won't matter if the reader doesn't care about the people in the story. Then we got off on about a dozen tangents: the funny things that have happened to us during our research (Virginia's son walked in on her just after she'd duct-taped herself up to find out how it felt!); the use of four letter words in our books; love scenes; unique settings, and on and on. Once we got going, we had trouble stopping. Speaking of four-letter words, my next post will be about them, so be sure to stay tuned!  

A writing friend is working on a book with a rural mountain setting. As she told me about her story, I was reminded of the Shenandoah Valley setting for my third book SECRET LIVES, so I suggested she take a look at SL for the atmosphere. Not, I hasten to add, that my friend needs any help with her writing, but it's often helpful to immerse yourself in books with similar settings. So I was thinking about this last night and picked up one of the very few copies I still have of SECRET LIVES. I wanted to read the beginning of the book with a fresh eye, as my friend will. I bet I haven't looked at this book in fifteen years. I remember adoring it. It has a pathetically boring cover, and it's long out of print, having been published around 1990 or so, but it was special to me because I felt as though I was truly finding my voice and my niche as I wrote it. It's a story with intense relationships of all sorts and it's full of secrets and twists. Imagine my surprise then, when I squirmed in discomfort as I read the first chapter. Chapter One opens in the point of view of a famous actress, Eden Riley, as she's preparing to be interviewed by a similarly famous interviewer-of-the-stars. It reads soooooooo much like a slick, chick-litty, Jackie Collinsy kind of romance. I hasten to add (once more) that I have nothing against chick-litty romances, but SECRET LIVES isn't one. Yet if I were a reader in today's world reading the first few pages, that's the sort of story I'd think I was about to get. That all changes, thank heavens, in Chapter Two, when Eden becomes a down-to-earth woman searching for her roots in the Viriginia mountains. Once I got into the second chapter--and better yet, into the third, which is the start of her mother's diary--I relaxed. It's a good book. It garnered wonderful reviews back in the day. Publishers Weekly said "The brisk, atmospherically evocative narrative is absorbing reading." I am grateful to the reviewers for making it through Chapter One. Although SL is no comedy, I found myself laughing as I read. For example, Eden arrives at her uncle's home with her Word Processor. There are no computers or cell phones or any of the trappings we take for granted in the twenty-first century. Why, it's practically an historical novel now! I'm going to keep reading it. I'm finding the journey back fascinating, akin to looking through photo albums of your early childhood and thinking "Wow, I was a dork" as you look at one picture and then "How did I ever get my hair to look so cute?" in the next. Best of all, rereading one of my older books encourages me as I start a new one: I did it before; I can do it again.

All I need to do to feel inadequate as a writer is to watch an episode of The Wire.   I resisted this HBO series for years. John would turn it on and I'd disappear into my office. He'd watch the reruns repeatedly. In the spirit of partnership, I tried to watch with him a couple of times, but I was 1) confused 2) repulsed by the language 3) stubborn in my distaste for entertainment involving drug abuse, and 3) depressed by the reality of the world that was being portrayed. When John told me The Wire was coming back for another season, I decided I would try one more time to get into it by starting at the beginning so I could follow the incredibly complex storyline.  We rented all of Season I through Netflicks (how did we survive before Netflicks? Seriously--we went to see Oceans Thirteen in the theater last weekend and it cost $17.50. Our Netflicks is only $20 a month.) Anyway, I got hooked on The Wire. I'm still terribly disturbed by it on any number of levels. Bury the "n" word? You only have to watch an hour of The Wire to feel the hopelessness of that symbolic gesture. I don't like feeling inured to that word. I also feel overwhelmed by the poverty, the corruption, the greed, the desperation and the utter hopelessness. I look back at the idealism I felt as a young social worker and feel intense discouragement. Yet this show is not a downer once you get into it, and that's a huge achievement given the subject matter. It's saved by its humanity, compassion . . . and occasional traces of humor. So why did I get hooked? The writing is spectacular. The acting is superb. The depiction of different social systems--the drug culture, the Baltimore police, the politicians, the long shoremen--is unflinching, tough and real. The characters are flawed and human. My sympathy for specific characters often catches me by surprise. I pull equally for a drug dealer, a cop or a snitch and when they don't succeed in their struggle, my heart breaks.  We're a few episodes into Season II. As a viewer, I'm filled with anticipation. As a writer, I'm studying new-to-me storytelling techniques. Either way, I'm obsessed. I can't wait to see what happens next.   Are any of you fans of this series?