Tag Archive for: “how to”

Lesson from Bon Jovi: “Do What You Can”

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By Kathryn Lane

When I give presentations on
writing, I’m often asked if I’ve experienced writer’s block – a slowdown of
creativity or the inability to create a new work.

When my creativity slows, I
turn to researching topics I’m writing about and that attracts my creative angels
again. But I’ve heard stories of how dreadful writer’s block can be. Truman
Capote spent the last ten years of his life speaking about the masterpiece he
was writing, a work that never materialized and possibly caused the stress that
triggered his nervous breakdown. How sad is that? 

On the other hand, Gabriel Garcia
Marquez, often spoke of his inability to progress on “One Hundred Years of
Solitude.” He gave up and drove his family from Mexico City, where they were
living, to the seaside resort of Acapulco for vacation. They were just arriving
at the bay of Acapulco when he stopped the car and turned around, explaining to
his wife that he now clearly saw the premise for “One Hundred Years of
Solitude.” Skipping vacation, he drove back to Mexico City, sat at his
typewriter, and banged out his masterpiece, the novel which undoubtedly won the
Nobel Prize in literature for him.

So
what happens when a writer hits a wall?

 

Recent
news about a song in the upcoming album 

When Bon Jovi’s tour was
cancelled due to COVID-19, he didn’t just stay home and fret. No, he stepped in
as dishwasher at his JBJ Soul Kitchen in Red Bank, New Jersey – a restaurant he
established years ago which often provides food to those in need.

 

An Instagram posting showing
him washing dishes, stated “When you can’t do what you do, then do what you
can.” That inspired him to create the song “Do What You Can.”

 

The
lesson in Bon Jovi’s action is to turn disappointment around when facing
adversity. If it’s writer’s block or any type of setback, flip it over by doing
what you can, rather than forcing yourself to do what you normally do. Until
inspiration hits again!

  

If
I experience writer’s block and turn to dish washing, I think my creativity
would return very quickly!

 

Ever
had writer’s block? How did you overcome it?




Kathryn’s books –
The Nikki Garcia Thriller series and her short story collection – Backyard
Volcano. All available on Amazon.



Kathryn Lane started out as a starving artist. To earn a living, she became
a certified public accountant and embarked on a career in international finance
with a major multinational corporation. After two decades, she left the
corporate world to plunge into writing mystery and suspense thrillers. In her
stories, Kathryn draws deeply from

https://www.kathryn-lane.com

https://www.facebook.com/kathrynlanewriter/

“If I Had Something to Say” by re_birf is
licensed under CC BY 2.0

Other photos from public domain.

How to Craft a Mystery

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by Bethany Maines
Step One:  Read the paper and/or listen to your weird uncle
to learn about strange ways people have died recently.  This usually involves blurting out something
like “ooh, another dead body!” while snatching up the paper in the middle of
the busy hour at a coffee shop. 
Bonus Points: If
someone shuffles away from you at the coffee shop, collect an additional 20 Murderer Alert points!
Step Two: Having
decided on your method of death it’s time for research! Start googling all
sorts of things that will help you cover up your crime.  Also, go on a vacation to the place that you
plan on putting your dead body. 
Bonus Points: If
you can say “This is a good place to kill someone!” in an aggressively cheerful
manner to the person at the tourist bureau who just wants to help, collect an
additional 20 Walking Sociopath points!
Step Three: Sit
down and write the book.  This is the
boring bit, but it does come with fun voices in your head to talk to.
Bonus Points: If
you finish the manuscript, collect an additional 20 I Have No Life points!
Step Four:  Realize that there is a plot-hole in your
book and go back to step three.
Bonus Points: If
you don’t become an alcoholic, collect an additional 20 At Least I’m Not an Asshole Like Hemingway points!
Step Five: Get
your book back from the editor and give back your Hemingway points while you
try to get over the stupid, stupid, stupid edits.
Bonus Points: Look,
you’ve got a complete book at this points, you shouldn’t need stupid bonus
points, but hey, if that’s what keeps you going, then take 5 I Need a Cookie points.
Step Six: Release
the book into the wild and realize that you are a winner!
An Unfamiliar Sea will be available on 1.21.20
Tish Yearly just opened a wedding venue on Orcas Island in
Washington State and one of her employees just drowned in four inches of water.
Now it’s up to Tish and her grandfather Tobias Yearly, the 79-year-old ex-CIA
agent and current private investigator, to find out who could have wanted the
sweet waitress dead. 

AN UNFAMILIAR SEA:
PRE-ORDER NOW! 










**

Bethany Maines is the award-winning author of the Carrie Mae Mysteries, San Juan Islands Mysteries, Shark Santoyo Crime Series, and numerous
short stories. When she’s not traveling to exotic lands, or kicking some
serious butt with her black belt in karate, she can be found chasing her
daughter or glued to the computer working on her next novel. You can also catch up with her on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and BookBub.

Checking Out Some Great “How To” Writing Guidelines

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by Paula
Gail Benson

 

Lately,
I’ve been coming across a number of online articles that express succinctly how
certain forms of genre fiction should be written. Here are a few I’ve
discovered:

 

Dennis
Palumbo wrote “Taking the Mystery Out of How
to Write a Mystery” (https://www.writersstore.com/taking-the-mystery-out-of-writing-mysteries/).
He lists three important elements: : “1) establishing the unique character of
the protagonist, 2) making narrative use of the world in which the story takes
place, and 3) planting clues (remember, only a few) that derive from the
particular aspects of that world.” Palumbo recommends that writers consider
what makes them unique and their own backgrounds in developing their
protagonists and settings.

 

Chuck
Wendig provides “25 Things Writers Should Know About Creating Mystery” (http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2012/05/08/25-things-writers-should-know-about-creating-mystery/).
He describes a mystery as an incomplete equation. Even though readers know the
answer will be revealed by the end, “[a] good story traps us in the moment and
compels us by its incompleteness.” Readers want to be part of the process. “[S]ometimes
creating mystery is not an act of asking a question but the deed of providing a
clearly incorrect answer. Let the audience seek the truth by showing them a
lie.” And, it’s important for plot and character to be intricately intertwined.
“Plot, after all, is like Soylent Green — it’s made of people.”

 

Ginny Wiehardt gives us the ten “Top Rules for Mystery Writing” (https://www.thebalancecareers.com/top-rules-for-mystery-writing-1277089).
Her article is written about mystery novels, but the suggestions are easily
adapted to short stories. She points out that people read mysteries for a “particular
experience.” They want the opportunity to solve the crime and they expect all
to turn out well in the end. Reading many mysteries to see how “the rules” have
been applied in those stories will be helpful to a writer, and understanding “the
rules” in order to better meet reader expectations will help a writer craft a
better mystery story. Among her recommendations are to introduce the detective,
culprit, and crime early and wait until the last possible moment to reveal the
culprit.

 

Peter
Derk explains the “The 8
Keys to a Good Heist Story” (https://litreactor.com/columns/the-8-keys-to-a-good-heist-story).
“A good heist has a planning stage, execution stage, and an escape. They can be
in different proportions, but if your story is missing one of the three, it
won’t pass muster.” Derk says there must be complications and a reason to root
for success. Also, he suggests taking care in putting the team together and
having a reason behind the operation that is greater than monetary gain.

 

Dr.
David Lewis Anderson gives a good description of “Time Travel in Science
Fiction” (http://andersoninstitute.com/time-travel-in-science-fiction.html).
He offers a historical analysis of science fiction stories that have used time
travel, but he also explores the elements writers have developed through those
stories.

 

In his “6 Secrets to Creating and
Sustaining Suspense,” (http://www.writersdigest.com/online-editor/6-secrets-to-creating-and-sustaining-suspense)
Steven James evaluates how to add suspense in mystery,
thriller, and literary stories. He suggests the key is to give readers
something to worry about, then explains how to do that.

 

Finally,
Jan Ellison offers “9 Practical Tricks for Writing
Your First Novel” (http://www.writersdigest.com/online-editor/9-practical-tricks-for-writing-your-first-novel).
Two of her recommendations that I found interesting were to set writing goals
that are completely within your control and keep working on a poem while
writing your novel. The poem allows you freedom of expression and provides a way
to get started with your writing.

 

Have you read any
writing “how to” articles lately?

Digital Publishing

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By Bethany Maines
Recently, I’ve been learning about the nitty gritty “how-to”
of e-publishing.  While there are many
how-to’s on how to put your story up for sale in the virtual marketplace,
learning how to make an epub file is a lot more difficult and confusing. 
As someone trained in how to make print books, this status
is infuriating to me.  I can make words
magically appear on paper – why is the screen any more difficult?  But as it turns out epub formatting is more
akin to website programming than to traditional book design.  Both epub and websites must account for the
fact that the designer can never be certain on what or how the end user will view
their product.  Will it be on a phone, a
tablet, or a desktop screen?  Will it be
a horizontal or vertical?  Which
operating system will be accessing the file? 
All of these factors play into how an e-book is seen and creating a file
that can be used in ANY format means that many of the traditional design
elements beloved by graphic designers, such as color, size, and forced white
space, must be set aside. Learning to create an epub is a bit like feeding
content into a slot in the wall, letting the machine in the next room whir away,
and then trying to guess how the machine works by looking at the book it
produces.
In the last few years website programming has experienced a
burst of development that can make creating a website an almost drag and drop, WYSISWYG
experience.  Meanwhile, digital publishing
lags behind, still in it’s infancy. 
Take a look at these images of the first page of my third
Carrie Mae Mystery novel, High-Caliber Concealer.  One is a screen cap from a mobile phone
kindle app and the other is a photo of the printed book.

You’ll notice several differences – the large area of white
space before the chapter title is gone and the fonts are not the same.  Fonts in epub’s must utilize a websafe font
or embed the font within the file.  But,
not all devices recognize embedded fonts, and they make a file larger and some
platforms take a percentage out of an author’s royalty based on download size
(you’re hogging space on their server).

However, there are some similarities that the programmer
managed to achieve.  Notice how the gap
between “Brunch” and “Mexico” mimics the print version?  And you’ll see that while the font isn’t the
same, the font hierarchy and general sizing of the chapter information is the
same as the print version. 
And beyond the appearance of words on a screen there is the
tricky business of making all the chapters appear in the right order and having
a hyper-linked (click and go) table of contents that allow readers to navigate
easily through the book. 

No digital book is as simple as a word doc you type at
home.  So if you see a well-crafted book
on your e-reading device, take a moment to appreciate the book programmer!  
***
Bethany Maines is the author of the Carrie
Mae Mysteries, Tales from the City of
Destiny and An Unseen Current.
 You can also view the Carrie Mae youtube video
or catch up with her on Twitter and Facebook.

Whodunit? Me!

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by Bethany Maines

On my recent trip to Iceland we were watching the BBC
channel in the hotel room before going to bed (the entertainment value of the
Icelandic Shopping Network could only last so long) and I caught a fun segment
about the British Library which is showing an exhibit called Murder in theLibrary: An A-Z of Crime Fiction. The exhibit looks at the development of the
whodunit genre and features the “10 Commandments” of Monsignor Ronald
Knox. 
If you haven’t looked up the good Monsignor’s rules they
basically consist of some guidelines to prevent the author from pulling
solutions to a problem out of thin air and keep a story based in reality.  The rules hold up pretty well even over
80 years after being written – except for that one about the Chinamen.  I’m not really sure what that rule was
attempting to accomplish, but we’ll hope that it wasn’t as racist as it
sounds. 
Anyway, once I returned home I did a quick google on the
exhibit and found an interesting article that covered the rules and posed the
question: Is the Whodunit dead? Has the reading public moved on to thrillers,
true crime and procedurals?  Is the
Whodunit now a passé relic of an older time?
Well, I have to say that if I took a survey of the authors
on this blog that the answer would be a definitive, “No!” The Whodunit is alive
and well on the Stilletto Blog – whether it’s Joelle Charbonneau’s roller
skating heroine cleaning up a small town mysteries or Maggie Barbieri’s college
professor solving murders with the help of a handsome NYPD homicide detective –
our gang write crimes that get solved.
It’s my personal theory that books, like music, no longer
have one mainstream genre that is overwhelmingly popular. The world has more
readers than ever and that allows readers to pick the specific genre that
appeals to them.  The Whodunit may
no longer be THE thing to read, but I don’t think it’s being read any
less.  In fact – I’m about to start
reading a new one today.