A Breakthrough!

If you write, you'll probably understand this.

If you don't, your eyes will betray your suspicion that I'm a bit mad. And then you will back away slowly.

But I had two amazing moments of clarity on Tempt the Devil last weekend.

#1 I realized I had the wrong detective.

It's a bit of agony trying to stretch the investigation of a murder over a novel-length work when QuiTai is the detective because she's so smart that it shouldn't take her that long to put things together. (Which is why even modern takes of Sherlock Holmes tend to still be short stories or novellas and not novels.) So either she had to be struck repeatedly by the stick of amazing stupidity (not going to happen!) or I had to put the investigation into the hands of someone who would need more time to piece things together.  

Last May at the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival, I asked mystery novelist Ellen Hart a question that at the time was just something that had popped into my head that moment but now seems strangely prescient. I asked her if the detective had to be the main character in a mystery. She said yes, I said okay, and we both went on with our lives. But as soon as I realized I had the wrong detective,  I recalled that question and the answer. QuiTai couldn't be the main character if she wasn't the detective. Frightening, but since Devil Incarnate was told from several points of view, I'd already let some characters take over the narrative. I decided I could do that again only confine it to two POV characters, QuiTai and the detective, but still the detective had to be main character.

Another rule of writing: the first chapter needs to be about the main character. So my great opening chapter wouldn't be the opening anymore. I had to come up with another first line. Which led to...



#2 My new first line(s)

I'm still debating if it's  

She was vapor. Insidious, addicting, forbidden.

or

She was vapor: insidious, addicting, forbidden.


I shall consult with the punctuation oracles for their wisdom and guidance about the subtle differences.

If you've read Devil's Concubine and Devil Incarnate, you know that vapor is her world's version of opium. So I'm not talking about a liquid in a gaseous state, although I like the evoked image of a maishun spirit type creature projected onto mist or water. He can reach, but never grasp her.

So I'm off and running now although I have to rewrite most of the first third of the book. If you're a writer, you understand why those moments of clarity are so rare and amazing. Who knows where they come from. Hours of pacing in the backyard seems to be the way I stumble on them. Or maybe they're evoked by writing the wrong thing. I do enough of that! But anyway, now I feel I'm on the right track and things are falling into place. That's not how I usually feel about things, so I'm determined to enjoy it.

It's A Mystery

A shady courtyard in New Orleans

Just back from New Orleans. Had a fantastic time. Writers need to get together and talk even though socializing seems to exhaust us. All that eye contact!

Ellen Hart's master class on mystery writing was worth the trip alone. As she talked about the structure of a mystery, pieces of my next novel started coming together in my mind. I've been having problems with the first chapter and a lot of what she said made me understand why I was having such trouble. That in turn set off a brainstorm of ideas on ways to fix it. The lovely thing is that after she spoke, she opened the floor to questions and we could discuss our writing conundrums to get her advice on how to solve them. Sure, she didn't know our stories and there wasn't time to get into detail, but we learn by hearing other people's questions as much as we learn by answers, so I got a lot out of it. 

Saints and Sinners is a literary conference so genre writers suffer through plenty of digs from the literary writers during the weekend. It happens every year. It was refreshing to hear Ellen say positive things about genre fiction (mystery, horror, erotica, romance, science fiction, etc.), and she was classy enough to do it without slamming literary fiction (which IS a genre). It's also nice to hear a writer say it's perfectly legit to write a beach read. It's so weird to be in a community that hates the rest of the world for not making it commercially successful while at the same time believing the rest of the world is unworthy of their art, and that commercial success is a type of failure. Writers. *eye roll*

The French Quarter

The Setting the Mystery panel with Val McDermid, Ellen Hart, Greg Herren, Carsen Taite, and moderator Anne Laughlin was great too. While it was about setting, discussion wandered to other aspects of writing mystery novels. Setting is so important in The Devil of Ponong that it was great to hear tips on evoking setting in a story and how to make a story feel as if "it could only happen here." I also left this panel with ideas buzzing around in my brain.

I'm exhausted, but it was a great weekend. Good friends, good food, good inspiration. Now all I have to do is write. Maybe after a long nap.

the bookseller's table