Refilling My Writing Well

New Muse Rising...

 
Hello, hello, my dears!

I know it's been a long time coming, but since my new release last year, I am finally getting the gears turning on my next story. I'm quite excited to share that this will be my first book series, following a team of televised ghost hunters as they investigate paranormal phenomena at various lodging sites around the world (hotels, inns, motels, B&Bs, etc.).

The first chapters are already written, started a while back before I'd even anticipated writing Coattails & Cocktails. The latter (a 1920s murder mystery) came about rather even unbeknownst to me! But I'm so glad the inspiration for that one struck and brought it into being. I had always wanted to write a murder mystery and feel so pleased having one under my belt now.😊

In any case, prior to writing that actual murder mystery, I was already priming myself to write about a murder mystery dinner, which will take place during my next book. Set in present day, this story will follow a group of friends spending the night at a quaint and historic bed and breakfast. They're simply gathering for a 1940s-themed mystery game (all decked out and acting in character), but personal conflicts simmering beneath the surface eventually come to a boil--ignited further by the presence of a TV ghost-hunting team seeking to confirm or deny claims that the property is haunted.

The end result will hopefully be a fun romp through contemporary romantic comedy, historical drama, and paranormal suspense--much in the vein of my debut novel, Seven for a Secret. I also expect it to be a standalone novella where this particular dinner party and B&B are concerned; the series will continue with the same paranormal investigation team, however, just at different locations involving different proprietors and/or guests.

There will also be a special feature of this series that I'll keep secret for now...something totally experimental that'll be a great writing challenge for me. And hopefully something that'll make it a truly "novel" reading experience for you! 😃

Until then, dear readers, I bid you happy days of happy reading--and I promise to return soon. 💋

~Rumer

Upstate 8 Literary Festival: Keynote (Part 4)

In Part 3 of my keynote address, I described my writing process yet emphasized how this will vary for everyone. I also recommended reading as essential to writing, and then questioned why we write in the first place. So, in attempting an answer to that...

Anaïs Nin once said, “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” 

That’s a lovely sentiment, isn’t it? Tasting life twice…what a sweet gift that writers get to enjoy.

Whether we’re writing fiction or non-fiction, we draw from life experience in some way to fuel our work with authenticity and heart. Who we are impacts what we write as well as how we write it. You and five of your friends could look at the same tree and each describe it differently.

It’s meaningful, not egotistical, to consider how your sense of self informs your writing. And it’s when you stop being yourself in your writing that it can start sounding inauthentic and cliché.

Because, they always say, “Write what you know.” And I agree with that, even though we have to write what we don’t know. I mean, I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been suspected of murder or haunted by a ghost. I haven’t lived in Victorian London or 1920s Chicago. I’ve never been a twenty-five-year-old man or an eighty-year-old woman. For that matter, I’ve never been a panda or puppy lost in the forest! But I’ve written characters who are, which means I rely on research, observation, and imagination as much as experience. I have to know what I don’t know, and then make the effort to know more about it. 

Writing what we know isn’t about writing our autobiographies. We can draw from events in our lives, but what we know is more about what we feel, how life experience has shaped us emotionally. We can harness that emotion to help us empathize with experiences outside of ourselves, and we can express it in a way that helps others empathize with us, too. The best way to engage our readers is to make them want to take the journey with us, inserting themselves into the experience even if they’ve never lived through anything like it either.

So, in tasting life twice, why not spice it up with more flavor? Why not challenge yourself to know what you don’t know and expand on experience? In many ways, my real life has offered the inspiration I’ve needed to get started, yet the story inevitably evolves from there, trekking into terrain unlike anything I’ve personally known. I simply fit true elements into fictional contexts to communicate something entirely new. It’s like dismantling a clock and using its gears to build a time machine.

Ernest Hemingway similarly said, “From all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive.”

We also infuse authenticity into our writing through our powers of observation. For most folks, the world becomes too familiar as we age, losing more and more of the wonder it once held for us as children. Back when we questioned everything, were so curious about all of the things.

Writers, though, are blessed with the ability to hold on to that wonder. We notice subtleties, noticing people and how they behave, wondering where they’re going or coming from, how they got that scar above their eyebrow or why they’re smiling to themselves when they think no one’s looking. We might notice a tree and think it looks kinda sad and lonely, or maybe something about it seems hopeful and safe. We notice with a painter’s eye that clouds aren’t just white or grey, or how the mood of a room shifts as the sun rises and sets. We notice what a gust of air feels like in our lungs, through our hair, and what it smells like, and what memories those scents can conjure. How the rustling leaves sound like a waterfall.

We behold the world with wonder, and not only are we richer for it, but we’ve been called to write it down so that others can see the world through our eyes and maybe notice it as if for the first time. 

There’s not always beauty in this awareness. We might instead reveal the darker side of humanity through gritty poems or prose. There might not be a happy ending. But there will always be Truth, so long as we write what we wonder at, and do so through our genuine voices and ability to empathize with what others might have to say, too. That is what makes our writing authentic and universal.

Unlike the negligent Dr. Frankenstein, however, we do need to be mindful of what we bring into being. Our writing inspires us, speaks to us, surprises us, yes, but it also relies on us to nurture and shape it, to find a suitable place in the world for it.

So, when you finish drafting your work, you’re really only just beginning. 

Sorry to break it to ya. But luckily, editing is a creative process, too.

More on that in Part 5, the conclusion of this keynote series...

Madness to the Method, Part 2: The Outline

In my previous post, "Madness to the Method, Part 1: The Brainstorm," I discussed how all of my stories originate from a very sloppy, scattered place: my brain. And the only way to get them out of my head is to kick up a windstorm in there and blow the ideas out onto paper like so much debris. At some point, though, these ideas need to be swept up into a plot pile, which then gets tidied into a story arc.

I've written short stories and vignettes here and there ever since I was a kid, and in crafting those, I usually do just sit and write from start to finish, having a general idea of where I want to go but pretty much making it all up along the way. So when I first took a crack at writing a novel, I automatically assumed I could approach it the same way. Which, when I now think about it, was incredibly naive and insane. Writing a few hundred or thousand words is one thing (don't get me wrong, short stories also benefit from advance planning), but taking on several tens of thousands is quite another. It can become a management nightmare if you just run into such a vast and wild, unexplored frontier with all creative guns blazing and no strategic plan. So as I continued to revise my first manuscript, I had to learn the hard way that backing cohesion and proper pacing into a novel is difficult as hell, and it would have behooved me to have an outline first.

Which is what I did for my second manuscript. I gathered my miscellaneous brainstorming and started to slot it into sections. Still spastic scribblings in my journal, by no means neatly divided into tiers of A, B, C, i, ii, iii, but guidance nonetheless. This bullet-pointed bird's-eye view helped me tremendously by giving a sense of the story's shape and direction without also confining my creativity. I wasn't bound to every idea that I jotted down here, nor were any of them fleshed out enough to dictate every step of the journey. Some writers might prefer a more detailed outline than this, but I've found I personally thrive under this balance between the concrete and the as-yet abstract. The organized and the organic. That gives me the breathing room I need to let myself change my mind if the characters want to head somewhere else, and it allows for those moments of magic when, truly and almost inexplicably inspired, you just write without knowing where it's going and end up creating something better than you could've ever achieved if you'd thought about it too hard.


Giving myself over to the story this way inevitably demands script changes, then, and sometimes I still manage to write myself into a corner. I leave certain aspects open to possibility so reach the inevitable fork in the road where I must commit to one outcome versus another. And I don't always want to go with what I originally planned--or have written myself so far outside that scope that it isn't even an option anymore--at which point I'll sit with pen and paper yet again and hash it out. In the case of both Seven for a Secret and What the Clocks Know, I was closing in on the final chapters when I needed to stop, step back, and brainstorm my way through a State of the Story outline: basically, Here's where my characters are at right now. Is this where I want them to be, and, if so, what are their options from here? It became a decision tree of sorts that ultimately helped me work out the solutions (and bust through my writer's block).

Ultimately, every writer needs to find what method works best for him or her, and surely the process continues to evolve with experience. With only two novel manuscripts down, a third in the works, and a fourth largely in the brainstorm stage, I have personally learned that I will never again attempt one without some semblance of an outline and especially encourage the practice to anyone out there who is writing a novel for the first time. 

Wassup in my WIP

~ * ~

A woman shares her sordid tale in the drawing room. 

Only she has lived to tell it.

~ * ~

Wassup in my WIP

~ * ~

Two gentlemen argue in the library. 

Only one will live through the night.

~ * ~

Jane's Addiction (My Addiction to Jane Austen, Rather)

(Somehow snapping a photo of the table like some creepy voyeur through the window felt less tacky than doing so inside the museum. I don't know, I work in mysterious ways.)

Making one of my usual literary pilgrimages in the UK, I visited Jane Austen's house in Chawton, Hampshire over the bank holiday weekend, where I gushed like a school girl over her writing table, the modest wooden surface on which Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion were written (and Sense & Sensibility, Pride & Prejudice, and Northanger Abbey revised). I then had the audacity to let it remind me of the far less accomplished short stories and essays I used to write at my little bistro table in the window of my Chicago studio apartment during grad school--one of which was a precursor to the novel manuscript I'm currently revising. Will have to possess the diligence, patience, and humility of Jane to see where that one ends up. :)

My gratitude to the Jane Austen's House Museum, at any rate, for a meaningful visit. Not only did I see the table where such great works were created, but I saw (and shamelessly bought a replica of!) the turquoise and gold ring that Kelly Clarkson bought at auction and would've taken out of the country if the museum hadn't bought it back, and I spoke with Jane's great-great-nephew in the drawing room; he seemed delighted that I was staying in the old garden cottage of his family's historic estate, where the same hedges grow that Jane would've strolled by. The ultimate past-meets-present experience that I shall be over the moon about for some time, reveling in the awesome that is Austen.

Taking the air with a turn about the garden. Dear me, if only I'd packed my good bonnet.

What a Coinky-Dink!

This spring, I finally got around to dusting off an old manuscript--my first novel attempt--and getting down to some serious revisions. After two more read-throughs this past week, I'm feeling really good about it. Granted, I once felt really good about my earlier drafts, too, which just the thought of now makes me criiiinge. But room for improving is infinite, so while I'll always be aspiring for that as a writer, I think I've got this little gal ready to query again.

This story is close to my heart for very personal reasons, but also because it indulges concepts that have always met my fancy. Ghosts, séances, déjà vu, synchronicity... I'm a total sucker for coincidences, always hoping to find connections between them even though it's perfectly plausible that they just happen at random. The human mind is such fertile ground for misperception and the consequences of when we see things the wrong way...or perhaps when we view them the right way but question our own memories and judgment.

In any case, I love crazy coincidences, like one Father's Day when my brother was talking about going to a ball game in Cleveland and how the fans kept singing "Hang on Sloopy," which we Illinoisans furrowed our brows at, wondering what the hell significance that song had for Cleveland or the state of Ohio; my dad didn't even know the song, and I said how I hadn't heard it in ages. And then...my other brother gave my dad a speaker to pimp out his TV, and to test it, he turned on one of those TV music channels, which...yes. Was playing "Hang on Sloopy," along with a factoid on the screen about how Ohio adopted it as its state song in the '80s. That is not a "meaningful" coincidence to me, per se, but still. Come ON. That's weird, right?

I notice things like this so much that I once started writing them down to see if I'd ever find a pattern among them. But I stopped that habit, before I could become a crazy lady with maps and articles taped to the walls and a web-work of yarn tacked between them as if it would one day all come together like the end of an M. Night Shyamalan movie.

So that being said, I'm reading nothing into what happened today. It simply makes me happy that after pouring my mind and heart back into the story of a character who loves coincidences, too, today on the Tube ride to the British Book Affair here in London, I cracked open my book of JD Salinger short stories right to an old favorite, "For Esme with Love and Squalor," and the very first sentence ended with "in England on April 18th."

In England on April 18th. Yes, I am.

Cheers, Margot. Here's to coincidence and querying.