My One-Minute Commute with Guest Author Edith Maxwell

November is "Place & Time" month here on my blog, so the posts focus on those topics in terms of where and when writers write or "where and when" as elements in their work. Or both! Come see where my guest Edith Maxwell writes - welcome back, Edith!  ~ Sheila

My One-Minute Commute

by Edith Maxwell

For the past four years I was a full-time technical writer and a full-time fiction writer. I wrote three and a half books: Speaking of Murder (as Tace Baker), A Tine to Live, a Tine to Die, and ‘Til Dirt Do Us Part, plus several short stories. I wrote fiction around the edges of commuting an hour each way to my job in the software industry in the greater Boston area. I carved out Saturday mornings and three-day solo writing retreats. It was very stressful, but writing fiction makes me happy, so I did it.

Edith's World

Last May, though, I took the plunge and left my day job. Now my commute is one minute long: upstairs to my lovely home office in our antique New England house. An oil painting titled “Edith’s World” hangs on the wall and features me writing at a desk with my imagination in the background. Next to it is a map of my town from over a hundred years ago. My writing buddy Birdie sometimes keeps me company.

It was a little financially imprudent to quit my job when I did. After a good friend was diagnosed with brain cancer a year ago at age fifty five, though, I did some deep thinking. If I found out I had only one more year to live (we are grateful Susan is still alive and pretty well, by the way), would I want to spend it writing technical documentation or murder mysteries? The answer was clear.

Now every morning I get my coffee and sit down at my desk. I first check email, Facebook, and favorite blogs for about an hour. I push out news of the day’s topic at my group blog, wickedcozyauthors.com. And then I open Scrivener and start writing. I began the third book in my Local Foods Mysteries series, Farmed and Dangerous, on September first. I set myself a goal of writing at least one thousand words every weekday. That gets me a first draft finished by December thirty-first, which leaves me four additional months to polish it before my deadline of May first. So far I’m on schedule. When I get stuck I glance up at the drawing of “The Muse Most of Us REALLY Need.”

I usually accomplish that goal by around eleven. Then I go to the gym or for an hour’s brisk walk. I use the afternoons for writing guest posts like this one, arranging new speaking or signing gigs, or doing any of the other many pieces of work that being an author entails. Sometimes I sit in my grandfather’s rocker and read. Occasionally I squeeze in a nap on the futon couch (which opens up to be a guest bed when we need it).

So I’m still working full time. I have had a couple of short-term tech writing contracts, but I now fit those in around the edges of my fiction. I was able to finish Bluffing is Murder, the second book in the Speaking of Mystery series, and send it to Barking Rain Press. I’m plotting a third series, this time historical mysteries with a Quaker midwife as sleuth protagonist and her friend and mentor, the very real John Greenleaf Whittier, in the 1880s. And I couldn’t be happier.

A former organic farmer, Edith Maxwell writes the Local Foods Mysteries with organic farmer Cam Flaherty, the Locavore Club, and locally sourced murder (Kensington Publishing). She writes (as Tace Baker) the Speaking of Mystery series from Barking Rain Press featuring Quaker linguistics professor Lauren Rousseau. Edith holds a PhD in linguistics and is a member of Amesbury  Meeting of Friends. Edith also writes award-winning short crime fiction, belongs to MWA, and is the secretary of Sisters in Crime New England. A mother and fourth-generation Californian, she lives north of Boston in an antique house with her beau and three cats.

http://www.edithmaxwell.com

http://www.facebook.com/EdithMaxwellAuthor

http://www.amazon.com/Edith-Maxwell/e/B001HQ0XU8/

Guest Author Laurien Berenson Confesses - She's Out of Control!

It's my great delight today to welcome one of my favorite authors of doggy mysteries today. I was reading her long before I ever thought of trying to write a mystery of my own, and she set a high standard. So here she is - sit! stay! and help me welcome Laurien Berenson!  ~ Sheila

Confessions of an Out of Control Author

by Laurien Berenson

I can’t control my characters. There, I’ve said it. I feel much better now. I have no idea how this happened. Maybe it was when they began to seem more real to me than some members of my own family? Or perhaps when I began to wonder what they were doing when I put the book aside and went away?

I write a cozy mystery series about a woman named Melanie Travis. She’s a busy person: a mother, a teacher, and a breeder and exhibitor of Standard Poodles. I began the series with what was meant to be a small, manageable, cast of continuing characters. There was Melanie, her young son, Davey, and her formidable Aunt Peg, the dog show doyenne whose dead husband and missing champion stud dog were the focus of A PEDIGREE TO DIE FOR, the series debut. Melanie and I have been together for sixteen books now and in that time, her entourage has grown exponentially. Not only that, but somewhere along the way I’m pretty sure that I lost control of her life.

A writer should start with a plan, right? An outline or synopsis would be great, but even the most disorganized among us can come up with a general idea of where the plot might reasonably be expected to go. And yet somehow, I’m always finding myself taking unanticipated detours. I’ve been writing these characters for years and the longer I know them, the less they feel inclined to listen to me. I’m pretty sure that there’s something wrong with that system.

In my new book, GONE WITH THE WOOF, Aunt Peg introduced me to a character whose existence I’d never previously suspected. And once she arrived on the scene, that new character quickly became integral to the plot. In other books, characters have gotten pregnant, quit jobs, and broken up relationships, all without my prior permission. And don’t even get me started on their penchant for road trips! These are all life—and series—changing events. So how is it that I never see them coming? And why can’t I do anything to rein those people in?

Each time I start a new book, I purposely introduce a handful of new characters whose  problems and dramas will form the nucleus of that book’s plot. I fully expect those characters to do what they need to do, then go away quietly at the end. But often they refuse to do so. Even though I’m quite certain their roles are finished, they somehow manage to hang around and pop up again in later books. In this fashion, Melanie has gained a husband, a new sister-in-law, and a gay friend who makes me laugh every time he appears on the scene. For some reason, these characters are determined to be part of the series’ larger story. And faced with their firm resolve to remain involved in Melanie’s journey, how can I say no?

I have to confess there are times when I find this trend a little alarming. Especially on those occasions when my characters reveal unexpected tidbits of information that send the plot spinning in a whole different direction. How do they do that? How do they know what to say? I’d like to believe that it’s my subconscious mind at work but, sadly, I’m afraid that’s not what’s going on.

My characters are beginning to think for themselves.

Pretty soon they’ll hardly need me at all. I’ll simply be their scribe, the only person in the vicinity who has fingers to hit the keys. Thank God I have the opposable thumbs. Otherwise it might just be chaos around here.

Laurien Berenson is the author of twenty eight  novels that have sold more than a million copies worldwide. Her current mystery series revolves around the world of dog shows, a mileu she knows well as her family has been involved in the sport of dogs for three generations. There are now sixteen Melanie Travis canine mysteries, the latest of which, GONE WITH THE WOOF, comes out this month.

Berenson is a four time winner of the Maxwell Award for Fiction from the Dog Writers Assoc. of America and a winner of the Romantic Times Reviewer’s Choice Award. She is also an Agatha and Macavity nominee. Her work has  appeared in The New York Times as well as numerous magazines. She is a graduate of Vassar College, and she and her husband live on a farm in Kentucky, surrounded by horses and dogs.

Her website is www.laurienberenson.com and she loves making friends on  Facebook.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Please come back Monday for Part 2 of "A Synergy of Image, Text, and Dogs" ~ see Part One here. And in the meantime, why not scroll back through some of the previous posts? August has been Dog Days, July focused (loosely) on history, and June was covered in cats! ~ Sheila

Life, Writing

Spring 2013 has been a tough one. Between catastrophic human-made and natural events and the venom so many people seem determined to spew at their fellow human beings, it makes me sometimes want to turn it all off, unplug, and wrap myself in earth, sky, sea, and the company of animals. And, of course, the good people who really are out there.

For today, though, I'm making this brief. I'm going off-line. This afternoon I will teach my class on memoir writing, and enjoy the company of a terrific group of people who come together each week to write and discuss. I walk out every week feeling inspired. This morning, I plan to read the copy-edited version of my forthcoming mystery, The Money Bird (more on that at my website). After my class, a walk in the woods or on the beach, whichever my fancy at the moment says is right.

But this is a blog about writing, so I'm going to invite you to read (or reread) my post "Writing What's Difficult: Finding the Balance." It fits into this week's news of devastating storms, and so much other news of the past few weeks. Then do something kind for someone else, and something kind for yourself.

My old Aussie boy Dustin
(Champion Brookridge Dustin U, CD, CGC, TDI)
and his 4-week-old son Taz.
Kindness incarnate.


 

A Picture May Prompt a Thousand Words

We've all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words. Here's another angle on that old saw: a photo (or other visual image) may also help inspire and expand ideas. I'm teaching a memoir-writing class right now, and each week I have offered my students some new tools to help them access memories and to enter deeper into the events they want (or need) to write about. Last week, I had everyone bring a photo to "explore" through some questions.

 

This exercise will work, too, for writers in other genres. For the poet, digging into an image, whether a personal photo or a found image, can pull up fascinating connections and inspirations. For the fiction writer, images of settings, people, animals, or objects can serve to inspire short stories or scenes in longer works, especially when the narrator or a character answers the questions. An image might even provide the kernel for a longer piece of writing. For nonfiction writers who work outside of memoir, images can inspire deeper explorations.

 

So if you're looking for a way to go deeper, or wider, or to find new ideas, try "interrogating" a photo or painting. Start with these questions:

 

• Where is this?
• When?
• Why were you there?
• Who else was there?
• Did you go there more than once?
• Did something special happen there?
• Is some object in the photo significant to you?
• Is a person or animal in the picture significant to you?

 

Now dig deeper:

• What do you hear?
• What do you smell?
• What did you eat or drink?
• What does it taste like?
• What’s the weather like?
• What time of day is it?
• What are you wearing?
• Who else is there?
• What do you feel with your hands, your feet, your skin….
• What emotions do you feel?

And so on....

Give it a try. Let me know how it goes. Send a picture of youself writing!

The Roots of Writing

This is the story of how we begin to remember
This is the powerful pulsing of love in the vein
After the dream of falling and calling your name out
These are the roots of rhythm
And the roots of rhythm remain

                                                Paul Simon, "Under African Skies"

I was listening to Paul Simon's Graceland album the other day. I'm also teaching a class called "Write Your Memoir," and I recently wrote a reflective "artist's statement" about my own writing career. Perhaps its the timely confluence of the three streams that has kept the refrain from "Under African Skies" (above) flowing through my head as I ponder its meaning.

This is the story of how we begin to remember. It's a story essential to all creativity if not meaningful life itself. Certain forms of writing - memoir, history, biography, for instance - are overtly centered on the past as conjured through memory and research. But that fact is that all writing, even sci fi set in the future and "pure" nonfiction, draw on memory. Unless we have profound amnesia or some other problem, we can't not use memory.

Still, some memories are slippery. Some are only partially formed, while others hide from us. And if you've ever compared your memories of events with those of your family or friends, you probably agree that some memories are shapeshifters, taking different forms for different people. That's because we are by nature story tellers, and "story" is more than a recounting of events. Story gives shape to those events, and the teller of the story selects details to include, omit, expand, pare down, change. But I digress.

So how do we begin to remember? Here are a few ideas that work for me:

• Freewrite. This is nothing new, but if you haven't let yourself go in a stream-of-consciousness freewrite for a while (or ever?), give it a try. I tell my students that any length of time is better than none, but I find that the magic begins to happen after twenty or thirty minutes for me. This is true whether I'm truly freewriting or I'm composing a piece of writing that I think has a specific focus or form.
• Walk. Or do something else that involves repetitive physical activity but leaves your mind mostly free. Leave the earbuds, the dog, and the friend/SO at home, turn off the tv is you're on a treadmill. Just move and let your mind go where it will. I've solved many a writing problem while walking. Try it.
• Look. At pictures. Pull out your old albums (or, if you're like me, the boxes of photos you will someday put into albums!) and see where the pictures take you. Make notes about memories that come to you. If you're trying to conjure a specific time period, go to the library or online and find photos from that period. Both the public images of various media and more private images that you can dig up may stir a lot of memories.
• Listen. Music is a terrific door into memory. Most of us associate certain songs with specific times, places, people, events. Find "top twenty" lists from the time you want to enter and make yourself a play list. YouTube, by the way, is superb for this - I've spent hours surfing videos of young Elvis and Grace Slick and Boy George and - oh, I could go on and on!

 

There are lots more techniques, of course - brainstorming, mind mapping, and so on - but that should get us started. Have a creative day! I'm off now to dig into the roots of my own rhythms.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Come back Wednesday, when my guest Monica Agnew-Kinneman will be telling us about her book So This is Heaven and a subject dear to my own heart, the joys of adopting older animals.

Writers Write! with Guest author p.m. terrell

I'm delighted to welcome author p.m. terrell today. She is the internationally acclaimed, award-winning author of more than 17 books in four genres. She is also the co-founder of The Book ‘Em Foundation and founder of Book ‘Em North Carolina Writers Conference and Book Fair, which raises money to increase literacy rates. I had the pleasure of attending Book 'Em NC last February  and had a great time - hard to beat a gathering of authors and readers, all together for a great cause! And not, here's how to write a page turner. Please leave comments, and check out the links at the end to learn more about p.m. terrell's latest work.  ~ Sheila

WRITING A PAGE-TURNER

by p.m. terrell

 

My first fiction was based on a real-life trucking industry kickback scheme in which I turned evidence over to the FBI. Writing a fictionalized version meant my genre had been chosen for me; because there was no mystery as to who the bad guys were, it fell into the suspense category. It was a natural fit because my career prior to writing had been in the computer industry with a specialty in computer crime and computer intelligence. 

But what I have found over the last twelve years of writing full-time is the same principles used to keep readers turning the pages in a suspense/thriller can be applied to any genre. For example, when I wrote my two historical books, Songbirds are Free and River Passage, I wrote them in the same style as my suspense—and they are still my most popular books. 

Here are a few ways to keep readers turning the pages, regardless of the genre you write: 

Begin your book in the middle of the scene. 

In a time in which attention spans are becoming increasingly smaller, it is particularly important to grab the reader’s attention with your very first paragraph. You can’t do that if you begin by building scenes that won’t grip them until much later in the book. You have to demand their attention immediately—and hold it. 

End each chapter with a cliff-hanger. 

A cliff-hanger is anything that causes the reader to want to move to the next chapter to see what happens next. I learned this by analyzing What Dreams May Come by Richard Matheson, which is not a suspense/thriller—but a book I could not put down until I had finished it. Every chapter ended with the build-up to the next chapter. 

The first half of the book should aim at a pivotal mid-point. 

I often see writers building their scenes to a climax that might occur 70,000 words into the story. But to avoid the middle sag that can develop in a full-length book, I always have two climactic scenes. One is in the middle and serves as an eye-opening pivotal point that causes the reader to sit up straight and realize that everything they’d read to that point was perhaps not what it seemed. From that point onward, it’s a roller coaster ride that never lets up. The end result, in creating that mid-point scene, is a first half that must happen fast in order to get all of the necessary components lined up—and a second half that is breathless. 

The climax should be earth-shattering. 

Because there is a jarring scene in the middle, the stakes are higher for a larger climactic scene at the end of the book in order for the reader to feel completely satisfied. That scene has to change the main character’s life in an earth-shattering way, and must also be strong enough for the reader to continue thinking about it long after they have set down the book.

 

p.m.terrell's latest book, Dylan’s Song, was released earlier this year. For more information about the author and her books, visit www.pmterrell.com and for more information on Book ‘Em, visit www.bookemnc.org.

What Do You Skip, What Do You Read?

"I try to leave out the parts that people skip."  So wrote Elmore Leonard, and I have seen that line quoted many times. On the surface, it makes a lot of sense. Like most soundbites, though, it means less the more we reconsider. I mean no disrespect to Leonard. He's a prolific writer, his novels are great fun, and his advice for writers is generally useful. Even this phrase is useful if it helps writers weed out the overwritten and the padded and the just plain dull.

But there are problems with it, too.

The first problem I see is that different people skip different things. I know many people -- including writers -- who swear they never read a preface or introduction or acknowledgements. I'm one of those people who does read all of the above. I like knowing what's behind a book. Knowing who the author thanks and how they do the thanking gives some insight into the author's personality and life, and I'm enough of a voyeur to enjoy that. I also like to learn more about why the book came to be, and that information is often framed in an introduction. One argument against those "peripheral" materials is that the book should speak for itself. I agree. I just think that "the book" is everything between the covers. Come to think of it, the front and back covers count, too.

Even if we stick to the main part of the book, though, the "skippable" parts vary with the reader. My husband skipped the long passages on church history and semiotics in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. As a student of folklore/linguistics/anthropology, I read and reread Eco's novelistic treatment of signs and symbols, and found the convoluted politics of the medieval church fascinating. But then I read "the whale chapter" in  Moby Dick. Several times.

Really, if we think about it, we can't avoid writing the parts that people skip because (and I know this is hard for the writers among you to read) some people will skip everything we write. I have personally skipped every word of quite a few books that simply didn't interest me. I've skipped everything past the first whatever number of pages or chapters in books I found boring or offensive or poorly written or.... I've skipped chapters that didn't interest me. Haven't you?

But back to Leonard. I think the real wisdom in the pearl I've quoted is the directive to consider what we include, to be sure it matters in the context of the story, the essay, the poem, the play. As writers, we have to exercise our critical muscles on our own work, and we have to be willing sometimes to delete. We also have to be willing to stand up for the parts we believe should be there, even if some readers skip them.

~~~

What parts do you skip when you read? What do you read that other people say they skip?

~~~~~

Please come back Friday to see what my guest p.m. terrell has to say about suspense. You won't want to skip any of her post!

 

Guest Author C. Hope Clark on Setting Fiction "Out in the Sticks"

I'm delighted to welcome C. Hope Clark as my guest today. If you have seriously explored resources for writers, you already know about her website FundsforWriters.com, selected by Writer’s Digest’s 101 Best Websites for Writers for the last 12 years. Her newsletters reach 35,000 readers. She is also author of The Carolina Slade Mystery Series, as well as The Shy Writer and The Shy Writer Reborn, how-to guides for the introverted writer in a noisy publishing world. To learn more, visit www.fundsforwriters.com  and  www.chopeclark.com  And if you'd like to know more about the Carolina Low Country setting of Clark's mysteries, check out the links at the end of this post. Frogmore Stew? Really?  ~ Sheila

 

When a Mystery Leaves the City Lights

 

by C. Hope Clark

In the Carolina Slade Mystery Series, Slade investigates agricultural crime. Death, murder, fraud, you name the crime, happens in the country as easily as in the city, only in more unique manners. And yes, there is a federal agency that specializes in agricultural crime.

A bribe in Lowcountry Bribe turns deadly as landowners die shortly after deeding away their farms. Children are kidnapped. Two attempted rapes. Murder by shotgun in a barn. The hog farmer isn’t quite the hayseed he likes people to believe he is. Then in Tidewater Murder, fraud and embezzlement become wound around voodoo, drugs, and modern day slavery leading to bodies in deep, dark, coastal water.

Out in the sticks, as some people call it, people think they can get away with, well, murder. Wide open spaces give ample chance for body disposal, and rural residents often possess talents and wiles a city dweller can’t imagine. Often that naiveté by urban types gives those rural folks greater odds of getting away with that murder.

Who knows what happens in vacant barns, forty miles from town? Or in distant marshes along the edge of property nobody ever sees from an Interstate? Ever wondered what would happen if you broke down on a two-lane road and had to knock on an old farm house? Most people assume a sweet couple comes to the door, offering lemonade to offset the summer heat, when they could be serial killers with a dozen bodies at the bottom of an irrigation pond, or buried two-feet down in mud and feces, half-eaten by hogs.

The American countryside has an ample supply of heroes and villains. A wide porch on a white-washed home doesn’t necessarily interpret into homespun. That genteel man with the farmer’s tan, John Deere hat and boots could make a girl’s heart beat faster as the perfect gent with strong arms and hands, but he might perform all sorts of sick, maniacal deeds deep in the woods.

On the other hand, the rural countryside, in its wide-open, fresh air image, can steal one’s breath. The smell of autumn in a harvested field or fresh-turned soil in the spring. The undulating waves across a soybean field. Cardinals, wrens and larks singing morning songs. The freedom of letting a dog run for miles, and the beauty of a sun-set from that wooden porch swing. Standing on the edge of a lake watching a heron swoop in like some prehistoric bird.

Then there’s the history factor. In Tidewater Murder, we learn about the Gullah culture, and how Gullah predecessors on St. Helena Island were the first slaves freed in the Civil War, allowing them in 1861 to assume control of farmlands, successfully raising rice and indigo. In Charleston, in trying to solve the land control mystery, we learn how General Sherman’s march through the state burned many records, a perpetual reminder of the northern domination of the time.

And who can overlook the food? Every locale has cuisine specialities. Frogmore stew, fried green tomatoes, shrimp, even barbecue assume a role in Slade’s stories. Fresh vegetables and home cooking.

A writer can take any profession, say farming, plop it into almost any setting, say the rural South, define the culture and history, and have a wonderful, colorful, mind-boggling tale. It’s all in the telling. No longer do we need our mysteries only in Los Angeles, Chicago or New York. Hollywood, South Carolina may not be the glitter and gold of its sister city in California, but you might find a whole new world well worth the visit, with crimes you never thought possible, performed by mannerly people you swore were pure Americana. Which is why you never see the evil coming.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

Opening to Tidewater Murder

One of the sharpest rural loan managers we had, Savannah Conroy slung attitude like paint on a canvas, wore sweaters like a Hollywood starlet, and managed an office like Steve Jobs. They’d built the Beaufort office around her to harness that charisma, and then added two more counties to keep her busy.

I glared at the new permanent marker stain on my carpet, as this Beaufort wonder shrieked in my ear. My breakfast, a bowl of instant grits with no butter, sat like a rock in my gut. My empty twenty-two-foot rental truck sat outside my apartment, awaiting boxes I’d packed for a week. Thunder rumbled. It started to rain.

Days didn’t come any more thrilling than this.

I pulled the phone further from my ear. “Savvy,” I said. “Chill. What’s wrong with you?”

“Monroe’s ransacking my files, Slade. He won’t answer my questions when I ask what he’s snooping for.” She exhaled hard. “He’s not listening to me.!”

“Dammit,” I grumbled, sitting on the floor and dabbing at the marker stain with a paper towel. “Maybe you need to ask nice.” 

 

“Bite me,” she replied.

 

The sky roiled with angry, gunmetal gray clouds. Trees arched. Wind whistled as it whipped around the building, warning me Mother Nature ruled my moving day.

 

Want to learn more about the culture of The Carolina Slade Mysteries?

·         The Gullah/Geechee Corridor - http://gullahgeecheecorridor.org/

·         Recipe for Frogmore Stew - http://charlestongateway.com/recipes/frogmore-stew/

·         Recipe for Fried Green Tomatoes - http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/tyler-florence/fried-green-tomatoes-recipe/index.html

·         Certified SC Grown - http://www.certifiedscgrown.com/

·         Edisto Island Preservation Alliance - http://preserveedisto.org/index.html

·         US Department of Agriculture Inspector General’s Office - http://www.usda.gov/oig/index.htm

 

 

C. Hope Clark is editor of FundsforWriters.com, selected by Writer’s Digest’s 101 Best Websites for Writers for the last 12 years. Her newsletters reach 35,000 readers. She is also author of The Carolina Slade Mystery Series, as well as The Shy Writer and The Shy Writer Reborn, how-to guides for the introverted writer in a noisy publishing world. www.fundsforwriters.com / www.chopeclark.com She’s published by Bell Bridge Books out of Memphis, TN.

 

 

Ten Ways to Help the Authors You Love

Authors are a needy bunch. We need time without distractions for our work. We need stimulation of various kinds (not necessarily ingested) to keep our creative juices flowing. We need readers, and that means we need a way to help readers find our books, articles, poems, plays.

Helping our favorite authors steer readers to their books may seem sort of irrelevant for us as readers, but it's not. Writing is hard work, and most authors really do want that work to bear fruit critically and financially.

For the authors among us, helping our fellow scribblers is the best thing we can do. We are not in competition with one another ~ after all, books and other publications are like the chips we munch while we read. No, we are in competition with all the other distractions of modern life. So encouraging people to read our peers books helps us, too. Besides, it's good karma.

So what can you do to help an author or three? Here are some ideas. Feel free to add more in your comments.

Buy books. This is obvious. What may not be obvious is that it matters how you buy them. Here are my preferences when possible:

1. Independent bookstores -- these are the places where people know and love books, and they are usually vital participants in their communities. Don't know an Indie near you? Try the IndieBound Indie Store Finder.
2. Online -- books, especially the newer ones, are often discounted by Internet booksellers. I encourage your to buy new books rather than used, though, at least part of the time -- the authors make nothing from sales of their used books.
3. Directly from the author if she or he offers books for sale. (We don't all do that, at least not all the time.)

Don't buy books. I'm serious. If you don't want to buy certain books, see if your library has them. If they don't have a book you want to read, ask them to order it.

Buy, but go to the library, too! Even if you do want a book in your own collection (or, like me, you like to write in the margins as you read!), check that your local libraries have the books you like.

Talk to booksellers. When you're in a bookstore, especially an Indie (where people tend to really care about books), be sure to let the booksellers know about books and authors you really like. If you like them, other readers will like them, too, and some of the stores will add those books to their inventories.

Write reviews. Reviews on amazon.com and other sites help other readers decide what to read, and may help make a book more visible when people search the sites. Be honest, but please also be civil and fair. For instance, I don't know what is gained by slamming a book for what it is not, as the reader did who complained that my cozy mystery didn't have enough sex in it.

Click "Like." Ever notice the Like buttons on amazon and other retail sites? If you like a book, click that button! It does some sort of magic in the grand digital scheme of things and helps the book rise to the searchable surface. Many author's also have author pages on various retail sites, and those pages also have Like buttons. If you like an author's work, like her author page. (Here's mine on amazon - subtle, eh?)

Follow authors. No, I'm not suggesting you stalk anyone. But most authors have one or more online method for letting their readers know what they're up to - Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, and other social media sites for a start. Most authors also have websites, and many have blogs and newsletters. (Another hint - those are live links that will take you my thingies.)

Go to Readings & Events. Support author readings and book signings when you can, even the ones you've never heard of. You might discover a book or writer you didn't know before, or learn something fascinating about the subject of a book or an author's path to publication or....who knows? Most such events are free. If you're an author, you can also learn more about what makes a successful event by attending those you can.

Tell Your Friends. If you like a book or author, tell your friends. Despite all the crazy digital marketing whirling around us these days, word of mouth (or word of your own social media presence) is still the best way for readers to find books and authors. If an author you're following posts something interesting, share it on your wall.

Drop the Author a Note. Really. Writing can be a very lonely business. We work, sometimes for years, on a book or other piece of writing, and if we're lucky enough to publish it, we send it out into the world and it never writes back. But you can. If a piece of writing moves you, or helps you, or makes you laugh out loud, and keeps you up all night because you have to read just one more chapter, let the author know that the work did what it was meant to do: it touched another human being.

Do you have more suggestions? Please share in a comment!

Oh, and one more thing. Share this blog!

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Come back on Monday - author C. Hope Clark, author of The Shy Writer and The Shy Writer Reborn and maven of the Funds for Writers, will be here to tell us what happens when murder leaves the big city lights. We'll have an excerpt of Tidewater Murder, her newest Carolina Slade mystery set in the low country of South Carolina.

Have a creative weekend!











Memoirs and "Memoirish" Nonfiction

My newest Write Your Memoir class begins this afternoon through the Cameron Art Museum's Museum School here in Wilmington, and I'm excited. I love teaching almost as much as I love writing, and the class is full, so I anticipate a rewarding and creative few weeks.

This class is focused on memoir, but memoir writers are everywhere you find writers. Whenever I teach writing classes, attend conferences, or participate in writing groups, there are invariable people present who are working on memoirs, or thinking about it. We (meaning "we humans," not just "we writers") have an abiding interest in our own stories. For a memoir to work for readers other than the author, though, it needs to be about more than me, me, me.






Let's get the confession out of the way: I'm working on two memoirs, too, or as I like to think of them, a "memoirish" nonfcition. Both of them weave my story into bigger stories, one of those about riding long-distance trains through the United States, the other about - surprise! - dogs. Let's talk about the doggy one.

Anyone who knows more about me than my name knows that dogs have been an important part of my personal and professional lives. So there's the core of the thing, the memoir part: me and dogs. And then there's the "ish" that makes it memoirish: the book is about dogs in a larger sense, about the linkages that have existed between our two species since we were both hunkering down in caves to gnaw on bones, which leads us to broader reflections on our place in the world and relationship to the creatures with whom we share it.



All of which prompted me recently to reread (for the fifth or sixth time) Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story: The Art of the Personal Narrative (2001), which I highly recommend to anyone writing memoir and, really, most types of narrative nonfiction. It's a slim book but is not an easy read. In fact, I'm sure I haven’t grasped all the subtleties even yet. Still, Gornick’s main point seems clearly to be that effective personal narrative is neither plot nor setting nor structure nor emotion alone, but a rich amalgam of those elements and more. Nor is effective personal narrative an exercise in self-indulgent navel gazing; the author must, Gornick argues, transcend the self and take on a persona that "is the instrument of illumination."


Structure is essential. To illustrate, Gornick reflects on a eulogy that stood out among several others because the eulogist had imposed structural order on the things she had to say. As Gornick put it, "Order made the sentences more shapely. Shapeliness increased the expressiveness of the language. Expressiveness deepened association....dramatic buildup occurred....This buildup is called texture. It was the texture that...caused me to feel, with powerful immediacy, not only the actuality of the woman being remembered but – even more vividly – the presence of the one doing the remembering."

Structure, the rest of the book argues, is built up of a situation and a story told in the voice of the writer’s persona. Just as a novel has a narrator who is not the author, a well-written memoir has a narrator -- Gornick's persona -- who is not the author. That's a sticky distinction for most of us to make, but it makes sense when we realize that we tell our own stories differently for different audiences. Or, as Gornick might say, we take on difference personae for differing purposes.


Gornick defines "situation" as "the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot," including conflict between the persona and something or someone integral to the situation itself. "Story," in contrast, "is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer; the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say." It is, in other words, the persona’s complex response to the situation.



It is that persona(l) response to a situation - the situation of the book - that draws us in, but it is the larger meaning of personal story that keeps us there, fascinated by another person's story because, in the end, it is our story, too.

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What are your favorite memoirs or "memoirishes"? I have a long list, but here are five that stand out for me, and they are all about much more than the authors who wrote them:

• Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams
• The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen
• Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey
• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass
• Dog Years by Mark Doty

I hope you'll come back on Friday, when I will be suggesting some ways that you can help your favorite authors (which of course helps you if you want to read more from them!). You can sign up at the right for reminders, or follow my Facebook page or Twitter - I always post the link when a new post shows up here.