Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

One of the side benefits to the writing life is getting to meet and hang out with other writers. In my case, mystery writers—who seem to be some of the nicest and funniest people around. So let me name drop. Coming over for shrimp and grits today are the Unarmed But Dangerous tour group: Elaine Viets, Rosemary Harris, Melanie Cole, and Donna Andrews, escorted by local mystery maven Molly Weston.

Also my local pals, Bren Bonner (Witchger), Sarah Shaber, Diane Chamberlain, Alexandra Sokoloff, and Katy Munger (aka Gallagher Gray and Chaz McGee.) Go read their websites and you’ll see why I’m looking forward to this evening. Wish y’all could pull up a chair to the table, too!

(And don't forget to come talk to me on Facebook.)

Do You Really Want to Write?

Many years ago, Redbook magazine did a survey: “If you could do anything else other than the job you’re in, what would it be?” Over 85% checked off Writer. So it’s not surprising that sooner or later, every writer will be asked, “How can I become a writer, too?” Sometimes it’s a wistful “I always wanted to write” or “I used to think I’d be a writer someday.” Sometimes it’s “There must be a secret and if you’d only tell me . . .”

Nor is it surprising that writers, knowing how genuinely lucky we are to earn a living at something we love so deeply, should yield to the temptation to share the things we’ve learned with others. I myself have taught workshops over the years and found it to be exhilarating, humbling, and ultimately so draining that I no longer do it. These days my advice is generally limited to “Don’t start worrying about agents or editors until you’ve finished a manuscript. Period.” Writing takes stamina and if you don’t have the staying power to write 300 pages and shape it into a book, you should probably renew your library card and move on to something else.

If you really want to try, though, and you can’t make it a real workshop or college campus, there are books and online seminars. Among the many excellent books on the subject, two that I can recommend are How to Write Killer Fiction by Carolyn Wheat and Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass.

I would also recommend that you check out www.GillianRoberts.com and click on Writing Lessons. Author of the popular Amanda Pepper series who has taught at the University of San Francisco and the College of Marin, Gillian Roberts takes beginning writers through the process in a clear step-by-step progression.

A relatively recent addition to teaching is award-winning author Alexandra

Sokoloff (disclaimer: Like Gillian, Alex is a personal friend), who has written a dynamic book, Screenwriting Tricks for Authors. You can download it on Kindle or get it for free on her blog, thedarksalon.blogspot.com.

Both of them have made me look at my own work with fresh, appraising eyes.

Weymouth Again

Once again, six of us headed out to the Weymouth Center for the Arts in Southern Pines (www.WeymouthCenter.com) last week for our fall writing retreat.  There are actually seven of us who cycle in and out, depending on schedules, but very seldom can we get seven schedules to mesh and this year was no exception.

 [Pictured left to right: Katy, Alex, Diane, me, Sarah, Mary Kay.]

Mary Kay Andrews (aka Kathy Trocheck), Sarah Shaber, and Alexandra Sokoloff were the first to arrive.  Diane Chamberlain, Katy Munger (aka Chaz McGee), and I trickled in over the next three days and we all wished Brynn Bonner could have been with us. 

Alex had used a fictionalized version of Weymouth as one of her settings in The Unseen and was a bit spooked to discover that some of the things she had made up were actually real.

I hoped to get a running start on the 2011 book (and did!), but first on my “must-do” list was to go over the copy edit of Christmas Mourning, which will be out next November.

Mary Kay was a hundred pages into her next book, while the others were still at the plotting and planning stages and needed to brainstorm ideas at the morning meeting.

After setting our goals for the day, we scattered to various corners of that gracious old house to work.  It’s hard to describe the synergistic effect of knowing that your colleagues are nearby, immersed in the creative process.  Pride was a sharp spur that kept us at our keyboards when the muse wanted to go wandering down to the kitchen or curl up for a quick nap.  No one wanted to have to face the others and admit that she hadn’t accomplished what she said she would. 

It wasn’t all work, of course.  We took turns cooking supper and afterwards we would check our email, Facebook pages, whatever.  More brainstorming and plotting, then a few word games, a glass of wine or handful of M&Ms, and so to bed.

Did we accomplish everything we hoped?  For the most part, yes, we did.  By the time we meet down in Georgia next spring, Mary Kay may be finished with her book and the rest of us will have a very good idea of where our own books are going.

Friends and Fellow Writers

One of the pleasures of a nearby New York Times-reporting bookstore is that the store brings in writer friends and colleagues I would not otherwise get to see very often.

Case in point was last Sunday.  Cathy Pickens (Can’t Never Tell) and Jane K. Cleland (Killer Keepsakes) came to Quail Ridge Books and Music with Rosemary Harris (The Big Dirt Nap).  Cathy and Jane I’ve known from their first books—Cathy’s won St. Martin’s Malice Award and Jane’s was nominated for a Best First Agatha—but this was my first (and surely not last!) meeting with Rosemary.  The three writers gave a delightful presentation that had customers lined up to buy their new books.  (I was hoping to post pictures, but they came out too fuzzy.)

I was back at the store on Thursday night for the launch of local buddy Alexandra Sokoloff’s The Unseen, another of her suspenseful horror stories.  This one uses a real event as her jumping off spot:  the opening after forty years of some seven hundred boxes of lab files from the parapsychology lab at Duke University that was headed by Dr. J.B. Rhine.

What her protagonist, a California psychologist, finds among those boxes is pure fiction.  What isn’t fiction is the character’s reaction to North Carolina’s trees.  Alex is from California herself and her take on our trees is something I’ve heard from other westerners, so I was amused to read:  There were many things about North Carolina that Laurel knew she would never get used to, but above all were the trees.  The trees were everywhere.  So dense they formed walls—walls lining the highways, walls obscuring the houses and the businesses, vast green walls preventing her from seeing any direction except in a straight line.  She sometimes felt as if she had been dropped into an enormous hedge labyrinth.  The trees made . . . navigation around town practically impossible.  In L.A. Laurel was used to triangulating off buildings.  A tree looks like a tree, especially when surrounded by hundreds and thousands of other trees.  She’d spent her first few weeks in a perpetual state of lost.

On Tuesday, yet another local lunching friend, Diane Chamberlain, will be at Quail Ridge with her new book, Secrets She Left Behind.  I’ll be in the audience applauding with all the rest.