I’m never the one to jump on the bandwagon of the latest new gadget.  After all, I think I’m the last American who has yet to own an Ipod.  But the Kindle, Amazon’s electronic book reader, had me intrigued… until I went to the site and saw the price.   Wow.

Okay, unless it is your first visit to my blog, you know the story.  These are not quite book reviews, but the insane ramblings of an aspiring writer who is reading books, mysteries in particular, to determine what makes a good one.

I have to say that my initial attraction to these books was curiosity.  I am a die-hard fan of Adrian Monk, and I was curious of the other detective with the same last name—especially after hearing there is also a nurse, and some mental issues, in this case amnesia.  I was wondering how similar these books were.  Well, they’re not.  Except that I’m now very much a fan of both Monks.( Read more... )

Okay, same old drill…not quite a book review.  Just a wannabe cozy writer surveying the territory, reading mysteries, and making notes of what I think worked and didn’t work in the mysteries I read.

I had heard of “The Cat Who…” series, so when I saw the first three of them in one volume I picked them up (I love a good deal, almost as much as I love a good book), along with a basketful of other books.  Now, I like cats.  I really do.  But the hype on these books was that the cat solves the mystery, which I originally thought was a little hokey, so I pushed off reading this one.

The volume I bought contained The Cat Who Could Read Backwards, The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern, and The Cat Who Turned On and Off, and I have to admit I enjoyed them.  They were a perfect bedtime read: light and easy reading.  I was surprised how old the first few were.  There was one character in there that reminded me of a hippie, so I checked the first date of publication, and found they were in the 1960s, yet the books, in my opinion, were not hopelessly dated.

Okay, some of you know the drill.  I’m an aspiring writer, reading mysteries as fast as my little hands can flip the pages, gleaning as I go.   So this will have some elements of a book review, but the focus will be on what I thought worked and what didn’t, so I can apply it to my own writing. 

First, let me candidly say that I am a Monk fanatic.  I will buy and read anything Monk, unless Lee Goldberg does something to seriously tick me off.  I usually have the books read on the release date, but was a little behind on this one, since we flew from Buffalo to LA to see a Monk event at the Paley Center.  Yeah, I’m a Monk nut.

Natalie’s voice seemed authentic, even if she does have a habit of addressing the reader, something which irks me—not because I personally find it irksome—but because I get busted whenever I try it.  The opening murder on the plane from Germany to Paris was tight, and interesting, and the dialog between Monk and Natalie very authentic and humorous.  I was getting excited about this book.

And then Natalie’s reaction to the changes in Paris-- It blew me away.  I have been really excited about Natalie’s character becoming more well-developed and authentic in the past few books.  In the early part of this one, she burst out of the pages, and Monk, who had been often criticized as being an impersonal OCD machine, suddenly came alive too.  Goldberg was able to provide insight into why Monk hated change so much, by mirroring it in Natalie.  The perceptive and understanding (and empathizing) Mr. Monk, whom we have caught a few glimpses of in the series, was now visible in the book.  Fantastic.  I’ve been hoping he would show up.  The quirky Monk entertains us.  This Monk enthralls us.

 

Some people learn best by reading, some by watching, and some by doing.  I’m one of the odd sorts that learn best by teaching things to others—or at least talking about things that I only have a glimmer of understanding about—and then hashing them out until I’ve gotten them right.

Such was the case last night, when I and a few fellow wannabe writers tackled the issue of ‘the hook’   in our regular weekly online chat.  (If anyone wants to join us, send me a line.)  Now, I had some idea of what a hook was; I likened it to fishing, and luring hapless victims into reading my book.  And certainly that’s part of it.  But I really was unclear as to what should go into a hook, and especially how to create a hook for my WIP, whose opening paragraphs I found wanting.

First, we read what some other writers said about hooks, and one thing that struck me was this quote:

A hook is simply making the reader ask a question and be interested in finding out the answer. And starting the story straightaway is a good idea. Start the story where the story starts. But 'getting into the story straightaway' and 'hooking' are not mutually exclusive. Get right to the story in a way that makes me ask a question. To use Maestro's example: I ask the quesion 'why? why did he cut off 3 people's heads?' And I want to know the answer. There's your hook.

(http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showpost.php?p=2915251&postcount=11)

Okay, and if I follow this line of thinking, perhaps what I should ask myself is,  what question(s) do I want the readers to ask themselves.  A couple of things came immediately to mind:

1)      Who is Wendy Gilmore (my protagonist) and how did she get involved in a detective story?

2)      Who is Lyn Mulvaney (my missing woman), and what happened to her?

3)      Who is the author, and who told her she could write?

We bandied the first two around for a while amongst ourselves.  Surely the identity and the voice of the cozy protagonist is very important.  But should the victim be in the foreground?

Having a large to-be-read box of mysteries right beside me came in handy.  What were other authors doing?  Well, mixed bag.  Not all had a clear, well-defined hook, but most did.  Some introduced the crime.  Others wandered into the lives of their detectives. 

I went back to my story, and deleted the whole first paragraph.  I restructured part of the second, bumped half of it to the next paragraph, and inserted one line.  My new ‘hook,’ which will probably change twelve more times, is now:

“Of all the hats worn by a preacher’s wife, I never imagined I’d have to add a fedora.  I wasn’t even sure they made them large enough to fit over the unmanageable mound of frizz I call my hair.  Not that I’m really a detective.  That's almost funny: Wendy Gilmore: housewife, mother, private eye.  But I certainly felt like one that morning.  As soon as I spotted the name of the missing woman in the newspaper, I recognized it.  And I was pretty sure I knew what had happened to her.”

How does that grab you?

OK, some of you know the drill.  Not quite a book report.  Not quite a critique.  These ramblings are the words of a wannabe cozy writer who, among other exercises, is devouring mysteries at a fantastic rate (OK, maybe a little slower than I would like to.) 

For each book I read in this genre, I now try to examine what worked, and IMO what didn’t; what tools the author employed so that I can learn what to do and what to avoid doing; and in some cases, what just might not work for me.  Because of that, I will sometimes appear to be trashing a book while claiming to like it.  That is not the intent. I am dissecting it.

 

Well, okay, I’m not really roaring, and I don’t chase people and goats around the neighborhood scattering bodily appendages in my wake.  But I feel old today, and a lot of it has to do with trends, some recent, and some not so recent, that have left me feeling a bit out of popular culture.  As if I even knew where popular culture was at any given moment.

Take, for example, the previous sentence.  It is NOT a sentence, and that bothers me.  I like writing that is composed of complete sentences, and not sentence fragments, which means I like my sentences to contain a subject and a verb, and express a complete thought.  (I used to teach English, so I thought I’d slip that in there.) The exception, of course, has always been in dialogue, since real people seldom speak in complete sentences.   Imagine my surprise to discover that someone has changed the rules, and now there are plenty of books out there in which fragments abound.  And the period no longer marks the end of a complete sentence—it simply signals a complete stop.  Like this.  And this.

And consider the subject of writing in the present tense.  Now there’s where I really show my age.  I’ve been told authors have been doing it for years.  In books.  Now I’ve tried to read a few things in the present tense.  I’ve never gotten beyond the first couple of paragraphs.  To me it always comes across as childish, as if written by a student who hadn’t mastered his tenses yet.   In an email—sure.  In a blog—why not?  But in a book?

I even wince a little when I start a sentence with a conjunction.  But I’m getting used to it. 

Then again, I also like art that resembles something, and poetry that uses capital letters and rhymes, so, consider the source. 

Wordiest woman alive—that’s me.  I reached this conclusion after editing a short story I recently wrote, hoping to enter it into a 4000 word writing contest.  I had an outline in my head, and it seemed reasonable for 4000 words, but when I had finished writing, I had accumulated over 6000.

That’s OK, live and learn, I thought.  Newbie mistake.  Even though it seemed incomprehensible that I could cut that many words out of a short story, I thought it had promise—perhaps for something else—so I gave it a quick edit, to tighten it up.  The first pass eliminated 1000 words without any significant changes to the story!  If I could eliminate 1000 words in one pass, could I do it again?

I saved that version, and edited it again—eliminating pleonasms, adverbs, most adjectives, and interjections.  I searched for the words well, oh, ah, that, just, actually, really, was, and had, and in most cases, eliminated them.  I used contractions wherever possible, made friends with the semi-colon, and reduced one secondary character to a verbal capacity just above Tarzan (but he was a drop-dead gorgeous weight-lifter anyway, so it kinda worked).  At the very end of my edit, I took out a few extraneous details (sad to see those go) and summarized a phone conversation instead of putting it in dialogue, but I got it down to 4000—even—including the title.  I was so proud of myself.  And then I read it.

Grrr.  The verbal liposuction had left me with a series of short, choppy sentences that had absolutely no flow.  But more hours of poring over them, restructuring and connecting, worked wonders.  I don’t know that it will win any prizes, but I learned a lot about my natural writing style, and how to tighten it up.

I rewarded myself by pulling out a book I had been anxious to start reading.  A friend had recommended the author to me, claiming our writing styles were very similar.  I opened it up, and I saw the similarity instantly-- well, oh, ah, that, just, actually, really, was, and had—only this time, I couldn’t do anything about it.  But now I understood the aggravation some readers have with wordiness; I wanted to throw the book across the room.  (Author’s name withheld for her protection.)