Tag: writing characters

Literary Criticism

I was thinking a couple of days ago about my various experiences of writing, and my mind uncorked a long-buried memory from the back of my mind. I may not have all the details straight, but this is the gist of it:

I was in school (not sure what grade), and my class was given a homework assignment (or maybe extra credit)–to write a play about Paul Revere’s ride at the Battle of Lexington and Concord. This particular class was where I had fallen in love with history to the same degree that I was in love with writing, and now I had a chance to combine the two! I couldn’t pass this opportunity up.

I remember coming to the assignment with the utmost seriousness. I wanted it to be as accurate and honest as I could make it from the version of the story presented to me in my class history book–I populated the play with farmers, churchmen, soldiers, and Quakers. I had Paul Revere complaining to his horse about the weather and about being tired and about how he hoped he didn’t get saddle sore. I went all out.

So the due date came, and I turned in my play. I seem to remember only one other girl did a play as well. My teacher decided to have the class read both the plays and hold a vote for who the class thought had the best one. So she called on people to read mine aloud first, then the other girl’s.

The other girl had not taken the pains to be historically correct. The characters were all named after her friends in the class. The narrative didn’t have much to do with the American Revolution at all.

But the girl was popular. And she had name-checked most of the other people in the class. I had a sinking feeling as I heard the class talking among themselves how much they liked hers more then mine. I just sat in my desk and started at the floor. The teacher had us vote with a show of hands. I held up my hand for mine and didn’t even look up to see if anyone else did. The silly play won.

I was left with this takeaway: my play had lost because I was the one who wrote it.

Silly, yes. Naive, a bit. But anyone who has spent time in writing spaces has seen this happen before, even among grownups. Literary merit doesn’t always bring success to the creator.

However.

My mistake was to turn this incident into a flat statement about my abilities: That my work could never be “good enough” because I would never be “good enough” because I was too smart, too show-offish, too unattractive, too too too–whatever.

My work is as good as it needs to be. And the more I work, the better it will get with practice. And the more persistent I am, the more opportunity I can create for myself and my work. That’s the bottom line.

Candy-Store Problem

A candy-store problem is when you have a lot of choices, and all of them are good–or at least not bad.

I have four ideas for books–a paranormal novel, a double murder mystery with a twist, a father-son relationship novel, and a mother-daughters novel. I have been trying to work on the paranormal novel as it’s an old manuscript that would need to be rewritten, as is the double murder mystery. The other two are fully outlined from beginning to end.

The murder mystery feels the most like a conventional genre book and the most commercial. The paranormal one feels like another small press book with the twists and turns it takes. The other two feel more conventional as well.

When I set back out doing this, I decided I would rewrite the four older manuscripts first, querying indie and small presses for the first three (Hurricane Baby, Looking for Home, and the paranormal book) and query agents for the murder mystery to see if I could get a Big 5 deal. Then I’d write the other two from scratch and maybe be of age to retire if I wanted to or try to think up new ideas if I didn’t.

Now I am wondering whether that’s the proper path to take.

But at least my choices are all good because they all involve writing!

So please think about me in the next few weeks as I chew over my choices. Happy writing to you all!

NEW ADVENTURE!

I finished my first draft of Looking for Home at some point between Thanksgiving and December 1, 2024 (I went back and looked), After January 1, I reread it and did a revision. In February 2025 I sent to beta readers, then a line editor worked it over, and then I swapped work with another professional writer, and she made some very good notes.

All of that feedback needed to be factored in and folded into the narrative, straightening out the chronology and cleaning up finer plot points. As well as cutting the wordcount down a bit. And today I restyled the first few paragraphs to clean up the last of those wordcount cuts, and I am DONE with Looking for Home, and I think it’s ready to query!

It has been quite the journey. I was not as driven writing this book, and it took twice as long to complete. I froze up on the regular, wondering how I could pull such a feat off again. I fought through the grief of losing my mom and quitting my job. And these last couple of weeks, the revisions just seemed too overwhelming to take on.

My writing buddy Shannon told me, “Just work on one page. That’s all. Then try to revise another page tomorrow.”

That did the trick. I got my confidence back, and it was off to the races. I just finished writing the last revised paragraph a few hours ago.

Next is drawing up the first list of publishers to query and seeing what happens!

But that will be tomorrow. Today I will celebrate that Carlton and Merrilyn and Cassie got their happy ending. As they should have. Stay tuned!

New Idea!

So I’ve settled what I’m going to work on for my next writing project.

I wrote out a thought experiment in the late 2000s–could you call a extramarital relationship cheating if the pair never actually had physical relations? What would such a relationship look like? And what would be the fallout if the relationship was revealed?

Now as a society, we have a term for this kind of relationship–an emotional affair–and many writers have explored the ramifications of such relationships in both fiction and nonfiction. So even though it’s tightly written and tightly plotted, I don’t think this story would work for today’s readers.

So I got to thinking. How could I change it to make it more interesting? I knew I didn’t want to do a romance manuscript–that’s not really where my interests lie. The story was dual point-of-view; I could choose to center the male main character, Steven Burr, or the female main character, Melissa Benedict.

As I reread the work, I realized that Steven experienced no growth during the story as I had it, while Melissa did. So I decided to center Melissa’s story as one of her own transformation as she got older and more experienced at life.

But that would be kind of a plain story, too–a lot of that kind of work is out in the world as well. What kind of spin could I put on it to make it more mine and more Southern Gothic?

I’ve always been fascinated by the Cassandra myth–the prophetess blessed with knowledge of the future but cursed to always have her pronunciations ignored by the people around her. What if Melissa encountered such a person–and her life was upended? Would Melissa passively accept what’s happening to her–or would she seize what control she could muster over her life?

So. The die is cast. I’ll start in September, God willing and the creek don’t rise.

Looking Ahead; Looking Back

So my activities are slowing down at this point. I have one event left in June and only one Zoom event scheduled for all of July. I am hoping to get my latest manuscript back from my other two readers by mid-July and plan to take that open time of no events to do whatever other edits need doing on it. I know I want to look very carefully at the word count, at the pacing of the actual beginning pages, and at making sure the continuities are right. We will see if anything else comes up.

August will be important for three reasons: the book will be a year old, the twentieth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is that month, and to that end, I have a lot of events scheduled. the first is an online “Talk To Me Day” on Mastodon on August 3, then there’s a Book Mart signing in Starkville on August 15 and the Possumtown Book Fest in Columbus the next day, August 16. Then another shot at a signing at B&N on August 23, another Zoom event on August 26, and finally a podcast recording with fellow author Rod Davis and my friend Shannon Evans on August 29, the actual date the storm hit Mississippi in 2005.

I am making such a big push because first-year sales are so important to the life of a book. I am probably going to stop hustling for events, press, etc. once the first year is over. The good news is I already have several possibilities for events in the next year; I just have to wait and see how those possibilities pan out. And anything else I am invited to I will need to be very judicious about whether to attend or not.

But I could never have anticipated what all has happened for my book this year–the reception by readers, the accolades from various quarters, the support from other authors, the support I’ve gotten from my publisher, my family, and my work–all amazing and humbling for the little book that could.

Rest

Rest. That’s what I tried doing this week after I finished this third draft. I mostly succeeded.

I read. Some nights I went to bed early. Other nights I participated in chats with friends.

One night I wrote out a very basic note on the plot of the chapter that I’m adding to the middle section. I plan to start on that tomorrow night and hopefully finish a good draft within a week.

But I can tell I’m getting close to done with the writing of this book.

How do I know? I’m not thinking about the characters all the time. The impetus to rush to the computer and type on the draft has lessened. I’m starting to turn my mind to what comes next–another go-around of edits, perfecting a few more places I already know need work, making sure all the little details get cleaned up in preparation for going out to the wide world of querying.

Hopefully I can have a few days to sit with the manuscript at the end of July and marvel that I managed to do it again. A whole other book. YAY!

Better Late Than Never!

And except for some scraps of dialogue here and there, my next revision is in the books. I do have one more scene I am tinkering with including–but it’s not a make-or-break thing if it doesn’t get in–I think the story would be better with it, but it’s fine without it, too.

It’s long. Like 345 pages long–much longer than Hurricane Baby. I may concentrate in the next revision on slimming it back down to 80,000 words. I can ask my next readers to look at repetitious passages, etc. We will see how it goes.

I still feel really accomplished. I want to be able to start shopping it in August 2025, and it looks like I’m on track to hit that goal. I have put a lot of words down on paper in this story. And these characters have really stuck with me for a long time. I just hope I keep doing the story justice.

In other news, I was at a lovely event in a small town in Alabama this past Saturday; I signed books and was in a good Q&A with the Friends of the Library organization there. I made a comment on how sometimes you can work on a project if you remind yourself that they characters aren’t real people and that it’s okay to kill them off. The moderator told me that for many of us, the characters become real people in our minds, and we get really upset when you kill one off. So lots of opinions were had and a lively discussion ensued.

So tonight I’m going to clean up loose threads and put this version of Looking for Home to bed. Wishing you all the best!

Search Engine Fun

One of the ways that technology has changed the writing game–writers used to have to spend time in libraries paging through volumes of books, encyclopedias, and magazines to find the particular facts needed to bring verisimilitude to their work. Having just the right details could bring a story to life.

(Or you could, you know, just make everything up. That’s why they called it fiction.)

But now we have a wealth of information at our fingertips–the World Wide Web (except for the parts corrupted with propaganda, AI, and misinformation. But that’s a rant for another day.)

So writers love to trade stories on the weirdest things they’ve ever looked up on a search engine and to joke about how some of those searches, especially from the crime writers, likely land us on various and sundry watch lists at law enforcement and intelligence agencies around the world.

Which brings me to what I know has been my oddest search engine request that I’ve ever done. This past week, I typed into the search bar the words “Klan rallies” with much trepidation. What would I actually find?

I was doing research for a scene in my work-in-progress, set in 1970’s east Tennessee. It was after much of the worst of the 1960’s terror of the Klan was broken, but pockets of Kluckers were still active in some communities. So I imagined my protagonists stumbling into a rally by accident.

Almost immediately I found a press account of an initiation in 2004 (yikes) in Tennessee documented in a local newspaper article indexed by the Southern Poverty and Law Center. I scanned it and figured out exactly how the scene would go down.

I tell this story to show how sometimes it takes staring into the abyss for us humans to understand how to bring justice and fairness to our worlds. I took information about a dark spot in America’s history and transmuted it into a scene that says something about how ordinary people cope in the face of this kind of evil. And sometimes that means us writers must do things that make us uncomfortable for our art.

Including looking up weird topics on the internet.

Happy writing!

Beta Readers Round One

So I heard back from several beta readers on Looking for Home. The verdicts were interesting.

Most of them agreed that minor characters in particular definitely needed more development. I had already realized this fact myself, so hearing it from readers was affirming–I wasn’t just being overly critical of myself. So now I am working at deepening roles of many of my side characters so that they get at least a bit of a semblance of a story arc.

As far as plot, the readers were almost unanimous that the pacing and the surprises were on point. One reader said it started off entirely too slowly for him. So I plan to go over that part carefully and see if there are parts I can cut, rearrange, what have you in order to not spend so much time setting the scene.

Almost everyone agreed that the story was easy to follow. Events made sense in the context of the story and were consistent for how I had set the world. One reader, however, was really unable to read past the heart of the story in the first third of the book. She told me she didn’t read stories that had that kind of situation as a plot element. She gave me her feedback on what she had read, and it was very insightful and useful. I apologized to her for the book being upsetting–and that I appreciated her candor and courage.

So now I have all kinds of ideas running around in my head for improvements. We will see where this goes. Next deadline is mid-to-end of May so I can turn it over to an editor friend of mine. Wish me well!