Category Archives: The Writing Life

Posts about writing for fun and profit.

Writer’s Block Still Sucks

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As unlikely as it may seem to regular readers of these blogs, I’m still suffering from writer’s block.

Writer’s block? How could Maria be suffering from writer’s block? She writes blog entries several times a week and she still writes the computer books that pay the bills. How could she possibly think she’s blocked?

That’s what some of you might be thinking. And frankly, I think it, too. But I’m sure writer’s block is the problem. Sadly, I still can’t figure out what’s causing it.

Back in June, I wrote a blog entry complaining about writer’s block. Back then, I was having trouble writing almost anything I needed to write. No, not needed. Wanted. I couldn’t write anything I wanted to write.

That included fiction and eBooks for an eBook publisher I was writing for.

I still haven’t written another eBook for David. And, what’s bothering me most is the fact that I haven’t written a single new word of the mystery book I’ve been trying so hard to write.

Well, obviously I haven’t been trying hard enough. But let’s not go there, okay?

And this problem is making me feel miserable.

(Of course, it could be the weather that’s making me feel miserable. It’s been cloudy and rainy for a long time now — days, in fact — and I’m really not used to it. I live in Arizona where it’s sunny most of the time. This El Nino weather system we’ve been experiencing is great for the desert and the cattle and the wildlife and the wildflowers. But it’s making me understand why Seattle has the highest suicide rate in the world. It’s depressing!)

The problem is, I have an overwhelming need to write. I think that’s one of the reasons I write these blog entries. Something inside of me demands that I share my thoughts with others. Blogs make it easy. They also give me the freedom to write whatever I want to write about. So I don’t have to write 650 pages about how to use Mac OS X 10.4. (Well, actually, I do. But not in my spare time. Just during that 7 to 3 workday.) I can write about anything. The weather, politics, flying, or having a bad case of writer’s block.

Last time I wrote about writer’s block, someone e-mailed me with a lengthy message that advised me to read a specific book. There was a lot in that message and I put it aside to read it when I had more time. More time never seemed to come. Then I changed e-mail programs. The message and its advice was lost. (That’s another good reason to use the Comments feature on these blogs. I can’t lose a comment.)

Today, I was in a bookstore down in Surprise. (Sadly, the closest real bookstore to Wickenburg is 32.65 miles away.) I browsed the books in the reference section, the ones about writing. I found a few books about writer’s block. One was a psychology book that claimed to explain why writer’s block happened. It had diagrams of brains in it. The type was dense, without headings, and it looked very dull. I was afraid that reading it would give me reader’s block, which would probably be worse. A few other books claimed to cure writer’s block. Well, they didn’t actually use the word “cure” but they clearly indicated that they could help. They help by making you do exercises. One of the exercises chilled me to the bone: “Describe the first time you can remember being very embarrassed.” Who the hell wants to remember that? Writing about bad personal experiences is supposed to make you want to write more? I put the book back very quickly.

I’ve been reading a lot of books about writing lately. Sometime last year, I read On Writing by Stephen King. I was extremely surprised by how motivated I was when I’d finished it. (I wasn’t motivated to write while I was reading it because I was so absorbed in it that I couldn’t put it down.) Following Mr. King’s suggestion, I dedicated several hours every evening to my mystery novel project. In no time at all, I’d knocked off about 90 pages or 30,000 words. And what I’d written was pretty good. Then I ran out of steam. Big time. In fact, I guess you can say that the fire had been put out with ice water.

Then I started reading books about writing mysteries. Perhaps I’d be able to pick it up again when I got some advice from mystery writers. I started one book called…oh, hell. I don’t remember. And I don’t have it anymore. I hated the book so much that I donated it to my local library. The book was going to teach me how to write a mystery by using a sample story the author had come up with. The sample story was so gawdawful that I couldn’t bear to read about it. The poor victim — a teenage girl — couldn’t just be murdered. She had to be sexually abused (or made to look like she was) before being murdered. And the murderer was a wacko. (Obviously.) Sheesh. I could never write about something like that and I didn’t want to pretend I could. So I gave the book away.

Next, I picked up a book called The Weekend Novelist Writes a Mystery. The premise behind this book is that the reader is a part-time novelist with a busy day job and family. The reader can only spare time for writing the mystery on weekends. So the book set out tasks for 52 weekends. I figured that my time is a bit more flexible, so I could do most weekend assignments in one evening. For example, do a bunch of exercises that would define the detective. The victim. The murderer. You get the idea. I worked on my assignments faithfully for about a week and they really did help me out. But when it got to the point where I needed to come up with notes for scenes, I ran out of steam again.

That gave me the idea that my problem had something to do with plot. I knew what was going to happen, but not all the details. I needed the details to write them. But, for some reason, I couldn’t come up with a good outline.

I tried index cards, Word’s outline feature, and a notebook. I ended up with a bunch of index cards, a half-finished outline, and a lot of scribbled and disorganized notes.

There was something else nagging me, too. All the books I’d read so far assumed that the victim would die before the detective entered the story — or before the story even started. But after 30,000 words, my victim was still alive. And, at the rate I was going, he’d be alive for at least another 30,000 words. That meant I had to edit what I had to become more focused. But, for the record, I still don’t plan to kill him off before my readers get a chance to know him a little.

I started reading other stuff. I read a book called Seven Floors High, which I absolutely, positively, do not recommend. I bought the damn thing from Amazon.com after reading glowing praise about it in the online reviews. What crap! I think that every single review was written by one of the author’s friends or people who work for his publisher. And I really do mean that. There wasn’t anything worth wasting time on in that book. It was poorly written in first person, present tense (of all things!) and had more exclamation points than periods. It was repetitious, had virtually no plot, and was pointless in every sense of the word. It was about a guy who gets a job in telecomm startup in the U.K. The startup looks like a fraud and everyone who works there spends more time drinking and doing drugs than working. And throughout the book, there’s a “secret narrator” who interjects information about U.S. secret spy stuff, etc. Several conversations in the book were engineered just to share otherwise irrelevant information like this as part of the plot. But none of the characters were remotely involved with spy stuff, so none of it fit. It was weird and stupid and pointless. How an author can get a piece of drivel like that published is beyond me. Yet I kept reading, expecting it to get better at some point. Or for the telecomm startup plot to somehow connect with the spy stuff. After all, all those reviewers said such good things. In the end, I felt as if I’d been ripped off by Amazon.com. I will never buy a book based on a reader review again. And this one is so bad, I wouldn’t even donate it to my library. It went right into the trash.

I read some books about writing. Actually, I guess it’s safe to say that I started reading a few books about writing. The first was Bird by Bird. I don’t recommend it. It’s obviously for people who have been rejected so many times that they’re beside themselves with self-pity. The author tries to be funny with jokes about her own paranoia and hypochondria, clearly expecting the reader to feel the same way she does. I don’t. My paranoia is not as keenly developed — at least not yet — and I’m don’t have any undue concerns about my health. So I thought her jokes were pretty stupid, especially when she kept using the same themes over and over throughout the book. I made it about 3/4 of the way through it.

I started The Plot Thickens: Eight Ways to Bring Fiction to Life. After all, I had a plot problem, didn’t I? The book was good — well written and full of good insight — but I just didn’t feel like reading it. (Are you starting to get the idea that my writer’s block problem centers around my avoidance of the plot issue? I am.) So I put it aside about 1/3 finished.

Next, I read a Tony Hillerman mystery and a Dick Francis mystery. I liked the Hillerman mystery a lot. The Dick Francis book was good, but his main character did a few stupid things that nearly got him killed. It’s hard to believe someone smart enough to solve a mystery would be dumb enough to put himself in danger like he did. I’d taken a second Dick Francis mystery from the library with that batch and found myself wishing that I’d taken two Hillermans instead. So I returned all three books without reading the second Francis book. It’ll still be there when I’m ready for it.

I started The First Five Pages, another writing book by the author of The Plot Thickens. The premise behind this book is that there are 19 factors to consider when writing a book — fiction or nonfiction — and that the editor wading through the slush pile will look for these things when looking for an excuse to reject a book. Noah Lukeman, the author, presents the topics in the order they’re most likely to shoot you down. For example, the first five are presentation, adjectives and adverbs, sound, comparison, and style. According to Lukeman, if you screw one or more of these up, it’ll be easy to spot and the reader won’t get past the first five pages. I have to say that I agree with him. His 19 factors are what makes a book work. A writer must be proficient at all 19 of them to produce a publishable book. In reading this book (I got about 4/5 finished before putting it aside), I was able to objectively look at my own work and decide where my biggest problems are: adjectives and adverbs, focus, and pacing and progression. That’s not to say that I’ve got the other 16 factors licked. I’ll probably reread most of this book — perhaps with a highlighter or notebook nearby — to make sure I fully understand the problems and solutions I need to tackle. The only thing I didn’t like about the book were the author’s examples of bad writing. The examples were so bad, they weren’t good examples. After all, does anyone write that bad? (Well, maybe the author of Seven Floors High.)

One interesting thing in that book: plot is not one of the 19 factors. (Perhaps there’s hope for me after all? Nah, you can’t avoid plot in a mystery.)

A friend of mine loaned me a copy of Michael Crichton’s book, State of Fear. I read it. I found the book enjoyable in that it had a plot that moved and it was just far enough from reality to be a good escape. It was full of facts and figures about global warming and, if that information is real, I appreciate having my eyes opened. Now I know Mr. Crichton is a bestselling author and he obviously knows a lot more about writing than I do. But I just can’t stand the way he breaks up scenes with spacing between paragraphs. It’s customary to use additional space between paragraphs to indicate a scene change within a chapter. But he continues the same scene — sometimes the same conversation within a scene — after that additional space! It drives me bonkers. My brain is not prepared for that and I simply can’t get used to it. The other thing he does — which other bestselling authors who’ve had their work turned into movies often do — is to constantly switch back and forth between character pairs or groups within a chapter. This is writing for the movies or television. Although it works well with visuals in the movies — a dinosaur is sniffing around the car where the kids are trapped; switch to rapter pen — it’s pretty annoying when done to the same extent in writing. Maybe it seems like I’m being nit-picky, but this is personal preference. I just don’t like to read books that pick up and drop scenes like they’re hot potatoes — especially when they’re not. One thing I will swear by — and this is after reading so many books about writing in a short period of time — Mr. Crichton has a lot to learn about showing vs. telling. He tells us everything, not giving his reader much opportunity to figure stuff out for himself. But what disappointed me most about this book was the loose ends he left behind: What ever happened to the cell phone the guy in Hong Kong put in his pocket? It seemed so important when I read about it, but it was never mentioned again. What ever happened to the French girl and her American boyfriend? They seemed like important bad guys, but they were never identified and never caught. What happened to the two NERF guys who were so obviously bad guys? Were they arrested? Was NERF brought down? Were they punished for what they did? Which girl did the lame-o lawyer hero wind up with? I suspect it was Sarah, but I can’t be sure. But I guess none of that matters. He’s proven himself as a bestselling author and can write whatever he damn pleases, whatever way he damn pleases. People will continue to buy his work and overlook any shortcomings. Personally, I’m going to re-read Jurassic Park, just to see how it compares with this latest work. I’m willing to bet that JP is a lot better written.

Which brings up another pet peeve of mine: bestselling authors lending their names to series that they don’t even write. I’m talking about Tom Clancy’s Net Force and Op Center books. I got fooled by one of the Net Force books. I thought I was buying a Tom Clancy book, something equivalent in quality to Hunt for Red October. I got a book that read like a made-for-TV-movie, full of side stories that had nothing to do with the plot (who cares about the main character’s son’s soccer game?) and may have been added to increase page count, and a narrative that obviously suspected the reader of having an IQ below 50 (remember: show, don’t tell!). I knew after 20 pages that Clancy hadn’t written what I was reading, but it took a moment for “created by Tom Clancy” on the cover to explain it to me. I guess a bestselling author gets to a certain point when he doesn’t have to write his own books anymore and can still make a ton of money on them. I hope I don’t get to that point — at least not until arthritis makes it impossible for me to write.

Writer’s block, she says? How can she possible have writer’s block. Look at all she’s written in this entry alone! It might be the work of a raving lunatic, but it’s not the work of someone with writer’s block!

Plot. That’s the problem. I need an outline. I need to get motivated. I need to shut myself up in a room without access to the Internet or other work I’ve written or any other distractions and write the outline. I need to stay at it until I’m done.

I use outlines for my computer books. Frankly, I can’t imagine writing one without an outline. It keeps me on track, it tells me where to go next. It also reminds me that I shouldn’t talk about this now because I’m going to talk about it in Chapter 12. Or I already did in Chapter 2. This is no different. It will definitely help me with that focus problem Mr. Lukeman so kindly pointed out.

I just finished another book yesterday. It’s called Eats, Shoots & Leaves and it’s about punctuation. Oddly, it is a bestselling book in the U.K. I’d seen it more than a few times on Amazon.com, while searching for books to help me get over this block, but have always disregarded it. After all, I know punctuation pretty well. I’m not saying I’m perfect, but I’m certainly above average. I don’t consider it one of my writing problems. But last week, when I stumbled into the library, looking for something new to read, I saw it on the shelf of new books. It’s a small volume with a Panda joke on the cover. (Unfortunately, my library stuck a library address sticker over the first two lines of the joke, making it difficult to read.) I decided to give it a try. I’m glad I did. It turns out that I qualify as a stickler for punctuation, since I get all hot and bothered when people use apostrophes and quotes incorrectly in signs and headlines. The book was full of information about the history of punctuation, as well as lots of examples of how misused punctuation can change the meaning of a sentence. For example, compare “The convict said the judge is crazy” to “The convict, said the judge, is crazy.” Ouch! Unfortunately, the Brits have different punctuation rules than we do, so the book is of limited use to Americans who need to learn about it. But the author’s sense of humor is great. I didn’t think it was possible to laugh out loud when reading a book about punctuation, but it certainly is. I liked the book so much, I bought an audio edition of it to listen to on long drives (or flights) and a copy in print to send to one of my editors, Cliff, the comma king.

What’s currently on my reading list? Writing Down the Bones is another book about writing that has gotten lots of praise. I’m a bit worried that it’ll be another Bird by Bird, so I’m not rushing into it. Today, I picked up Writing Mysteries (a Writer’s Digest book edited by Sue Grafton) and Pen on Fire: A Busy Woman’s Guide to Igniting the Writer Within. I don’t know why I picked up this second book. The inclusion of words like woman and igniting in a book’s title normally raises red flags. I may be a woman, but I don’t see why a woman needs different advice about writing than a man. I have a sneaking suspicion that there will be instructions in here for balancing my family and career or finding time away from the kids to write. I don’t have kids. I don’t really have a family, either. And my career is as a writer — that’s my day job. As for igniting — that’s a stupid marketing word that someone at the publisher obviously wanted to use to punch up the title. (You wouldn’t believe how a publisher’s marketing department gets involved in cover copy when they obviously haven’t even read the book.) Actually, in paging through this book, I realize that I’d better take it back. It’s really not for me.

(Thinking back on this, I realize that I’d picked up this book in the store right before my cell phone rang. It was Rod on the phone and I hadn’t spoken to him in two months, so I found a comfy chair in a quiet corner of Barnes and Nobel and chatted with him for about 15 minutes. Mike came in from Best Buys and read a magazine in a nearby chair while I talked. Then I hung up and we decided to go. I didn’t review the books I was carrying. If I did, I would have noticed the illustration on one cover, which showed a laundry basket, a child’s toys, and a stressed-out looking woman with a pen in her hand. Not a book for me. So I’ll blame it on Rod.)

But Writing Mysteries shows promise. I think I’ll tackle that one next. Or at least after I finish The First Five Pages and The Plot Thickens. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

And about that outline…

I’m sure I’ll get to it soon.

Tiger: The Saga Continues

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I continue work on my Tiger book.

The other day, I got a new Tiger build from Apple. I’d been waiting anxiously for it. My editor, Cliff, who’d been at the Keynote address at Macworld Expo had reported that the build Steve Jobs was using for his demo looked different from what we had. Although most authors wouldn’t mind a few appearance differences, my book has over 2,000 screenshots in it and every minor difference will affect at least one page. So after having some difficulties with Font Book and not being motivated enough to revise the Classic chapter, I put the book aside to wait for new software.

The differences, it turns out, are not major. Sure, some screenshots will change, but not many. The New Burnable Folder command has become the New Burn Folder command — that little change will force me to revise every single screenshot of the File menu. But hey, I expect stuff like that. It goes with the territory. It’s one of the drawbacks of writing about software that hasn’t been completed yet.

Interestingly, I’ll work with the software right up to the Gold Master and still get the book out on time. That’s because of the “system” Peachpit and I have for getting these books done. No other publisher works the way we do. As a result, if another book comes out on time, it’s likely based on something other than the Gold Master. That means it’ll have errors in it. But more likely, other books will be delayed and will appear on shelves a month or more after Mac OS X 10.4 has gone to the Apple Stores and is available in new computers.

Yesterday, I worked on the Applications chapter, the one where I go into some detail on how to use the applications that come with Mac OS X. We’ve decided to folk the i-Apps chapter into this one, so it’s likely to be a very long chapter. I got about 20 pages done yesterday and I hope to finish it up today. I found two surprises in the Applications folder: a brand new application that I’m looking forward to using every day and the return of an old application that disappeared when Mac OS X was first released. I’m not sure if I can talk about them — Apple is notoriously secretive about pre-release software and I don’t want to get sued — so I won’t. But I think Mac users will be pleasantly surprised (as I was) to find at least one of these new tools.

The book is over 600 pages long so I have a lot of work to do. It’s my biggest book, both in size and sales, and the one I’m proudest of. Mac OS has grown quite a bit since I first wrote about it for Mac OS 8. It has far more features and is a bit more complex than the Mac OS of the old days. The book makes the complex features simple and the simple features even simpler. It also has tons of tips and tricks for using Mac OS X.

Old Stuff

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I re-read some very old work.

I just spent an hour re-reading portions of a novel I was working on back in the 1980s.

The files are on my laptop and I know how old they are because I read the creation date of the files — August 1989 — and know for a fact that they date before that. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, they were originally written in longhand on yellow legal pads when I had my first job, right out of college. That would set the date at around 1982 or 1983. More than twenty years ago.

I probably typed them into my first computer, an Apple //c, not long after I bought it in 1984. I used AppleWorks back then. Then, when I bought my first Mac in 1989, they were probably among the batch of files I transferred from the Apple //c to the Mac IIcx via a specially-constructed serial cable as an upload into Microsoft Works. Somewhere along the way, I converted most of the files to Word format, but a few of them are still Works files. Word will open them, but there are a lot of extraneous characters that need editing out to make the work really readable.

I don’t really want to discuss the work here. I will say that it’s one of several novels I never finished and it really isn’t bad. It isn’t good, either, though. I know there’s more to it — still on yellow legal paper — somewhere in a box downstairs. I remember reading it not long ago when I was cleaning out a closet. It was never typed into AppleWorks. I probably lost interest in the piece before the typing was done.

I typed much slower in those days — only about 20 words per minute — and I remember how tedious all that typing was. I’m much faster now — probably 80 to 100 words per minute — and I actually type much faster than I write longhand. Maybe someday I’ll finish typing it all in, just so I can have some more aging computer files to look back on.

My PowerBook has just about all the fiction I’ve ever written and put into digital format stored on its hard disk. The backup is on my desktop Mac back at my office and on my iDisk storage space. I don’t write fiction in the office. And I don’t write computer books on my laptop.

Of all my fiction, I’ve only put one short story online. It’s a story about some of the characters from yet another unfinished novel. A back story, turned into a short story. I have a bunch of those back stories, but the one I put online is the only one I wanted to share with others. That story is also old — at least 5 years, according to the creation date of the file on my laptop. But then again, that might not be the original file. It could be older. Maybe I should date my work so I can tell how old it really is, even after file creation dates get changed by software updates and the like.

I think I’ll dig out those yellow pad pages again. I’d like to read the rest of what I wrote.

Writing about Tiger

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I begin work on my Mac OS X book revision.

I started working on my Tiger book this week.

So far, I have three of the 21 chapters done. I skipped Chapter 1, which is about installation and configuration. I always do that one last. Instead, I dove right into the Finder chapters: Finder Basics, File Management, Advanced Finder Techniques.

I added some new information to the File Management chapter about a new and undocumented feature called burnable folders. This was a challenge. Although I could figure out how to use this feature and write sufficiently about it, there wasn’t a single mention of it anywhere in online help or Apple’s Tiger Web pages.

What burns me up about this is that although I couldn’t find any official documentation about the feature, there was an article, with screen shots, on someone else’s Web site. Why does that burn me up? Because I had to sign a nondisclosure and swear up and down that I wouldn’t share anything about Tiger — especially screen shots — with anyone until the software was released. Technically, if my husband looks over my shoulder while I’m writing, I’d be in violation of this agreement. So that prevents me from giving my readers a sneak preview of the software and getting them all fired up for what’s to come. Yet someone else can publish articles on the Web, for the world to see, without getting in trouble. Does that sound fair?

Anyway, about burnable folders, to make matters worse, since I’m working with pre-release software, the feature isn’t perfected yet and is a bit buggy. Or perhaps it just set up conflicts with my screen shot software. In any case, my eMac was acting up and had to be restarted periodically. So it took me the better part of an afternoon to write two new pages and rewrite two others.

The Advanced Finder Techniques chapter was completely reworked. I pulled a lot of material out of this chapter to make a new chapter (Chapter 6) about customizing the Finder. This required complete renumbering of all figures throughout the chapter. A tedious task, but someone has to do it.

Next week, I continue writing with a brand new chapter about Apple’s new Spotlight and Smart Folders features. I hope to be able to knock that one off in two days.

It’s a Mystery to Me

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A little bit about the mystery novel I’ve been working on (or not working on) for the past year.

About a year ago, I started writing a mystery novel. It’s the same novel I mentioned in the entry titled “Writer’s Block Sucks” earlier in this blog. I haven’t added a word to it since then.

The book’s characters are very strong, based roughly on people I knew not too long ago. They were odd people with odd relationships, the kind of people who would be memorable in a novel. I haven’t seen these people in over two years now, but my memories of them are very clear — especially the memories about their unorthodox attitudes and behaviors. In recreating them for fiction, I changed them enough to avoid a lawsuit if the work ever got published. The similarities remain, but there’s not enough of them for any of the people to say, “Hey, she’s writing about me!” Even I’m in the book, changed enough to be barely recognizable. My character is both secondary protagonist (or sidekick) and suspect.

The protagonist or detective is completely fictional. From New York, he’s well-off and lives a comfortable Manhattan life. Yet his wealth is relatively new and he’s down-to-earth. He can mix well with all kinds of people. And the southwest town environment he’s in for this novel is a true test of his ability to adapt. His name is John and he’s a first-person narrator. In writing about the small town of Coyote Springs as seen through his eyes, I explain small, southwest towns like Wickenburg as seen by New Yorkers. It’s a view I had when I first came here, but is quickly fading as my memories of New York fade away. Part of what I’m trying to achieve in this work is to capture the wonder and disbelief I felt about the southwest years ago and document it for all time.

When I started this work, I wrote quickly with only a handful of notes to guide me. I knew who the characters were, I knew who was going to die, I knew who killed him, and I knew why the murder was committed. I also knew motives for a few other characters (red herrings). The words came quickly as I developed scene after scene. Some scenes did what they were required to do: provide background information and move the plot forward. Other scenes developed character relationships and shared information about the fictional setting with readers.

About 100 pages into the work, I stalled. And I remain stalled, to this day, right there.

A little writer’s block is normally nothing to be worried about. I’d had it before and I’ll have it again. I usually snap out of it within a few weeks, depending on what I have to write. If I’m writing a computer book, I snap out of it in a day or so — I have to if I expect to continue earning a living. But a work of fiction, with no buyer lined up for the finished product, is different. There’s no one prodding me for more pages, no one asking when the next chapter will come. There’s no milestone advance check dangling in front of me, like a carrot on a stick. There’s no real reason to finish.

But I wanted to finish this work. I wanted to try to get it published. I’d read a lot of mystery novels and I felt strongly that I could craft a story with characters, puzzle, and plot that was just as good as most of them — and better than quite a few. Still, I remained stalled.

I thought about what had gotten me started in the first place. It was a combination of things. One was the idea of killing someone I couldn’t really kill. No, I couldn’t murder someone I didn’t like, but I could, in writing, tell the story of how a fictional representation of that person was killed. And, along the way, I could entertain and educate readers. And write something other than computer how-to books and articles.

The other thing that motivated me to begin was a Stephen King book. No, it wasn’t one of his horror books. Although I was a big fan of Stephen King years and years ago — when his first novel, Carrie, came out, in fact — I hadn’t read any of his work in years. But while browsing the bookstore shelves, I came across a nonfiction book he’d written: On Writing. I bought it and devoured it (with my eyes, not my teeth) in just two days. It was an excellent motivator for me. It told the story of how he’d gotten started and the way he works. It then provided guidance for writers that didn’t talk about grammar or usage or any of the nonsense many writer’s guides go into. (If you can’t structure a sentence, you shouldn’t be a writer.) The other thing conspicuously missing from the book: exercises. Stephen King wasn’t leading a “how to write a novel” course. He was telling the reader about his experiences and what he thought worked. And, given his record, that’s something worth reading.

When I finished On Writing, I felt charged up and ready to go. And I did. I wrote about 100 pages in less than two weeks. But that was it.

I tried to analyze the problem. I knew I had scenes to write, but I was worried that the plot wasn’t progressing at a fast enough pace to keep the reader interested. I felt that the problem I was posing was too easy to solve, that the murderer would be too obvious. I made notes about other character relationships, building stronger motives for other characters. And when all that thought and note-taking didn’t help, I hopped onto Amazon.com, shopped around, and bought a few more books about writing. I hoped that some of them would motivate me.

Among the books I bought were books specifically about writing mysteries. I read a few of them right away. One of them said something that chilled me to the bone. It said that if you wrote without being fully prepared, you’d get about 95 to 100 pages into your story and stall. At the time, I didn’t know how far I’d gotten, but I whipped out my laptop and checked. 98 pages. Sheesh. How did he know?

All the books made one important assumption: that the murder had been committed before the novel opens. In fact, they all seemed to assume that the story opens at the scene of the crime, with the body still in place.

My mystery doesn’t start like that. In fact, 100 pages into the novel, the victim is still alive. I’ve been giving that a lot of thought. Why isn’t he dead yet? Why haven’t I killed him? My conclusion: I’m developing his character along with the others. I want the reader to feel like I do: that he deserves to die. But in reading these how-to books, I realize that may be a mistake. To make a reader care about solving the murder, you have to make him care either about the victim or about clearing the name of a suspect he likes. Although I’m establishing one character as a likable suspect, one that the reader doesn’t want to see as guilty, I shouldn’t waste pages making the victim so unlikable.

In looking at my notes, I realize that at least another 50 pages will go by before my victim dies. That’s something I need to fix.

Years ago, I had a friend who was passionate about becoming a fiction writer. She wrote short stories, novels, and other works of fiction after work. She frequented writer’s message boards on BBSes (before Internet mailing lists), and spoke up about what she believed. Unfortunately, she didn’t have a very good attitude about the business of writing. In her mind, editors were evil and their sole purpose in life was to destroy the work and moral of writers through extensive editing and rejection. When she quit her job to write full-time, I knew what the outcome would be. I was right: a year later, she was deep in debt and still hadn’t sold a single piece of work. I don’t know where she is now or what she’s doing, but I’m pretty sure she’s not making a living as a writer. Yet there was one thing I remember her saying, one piece of advice that I can’t argue with: “If you can’t go forward, go backwards.”

I don’t know if I understand that statement the way she meant it, but it does make sense to me. If you can’t continue a story, there must be something wrong with what went before it. Go back to previous pages and examine them. Where did the plot take the wrong turn? Tear out the bad pages and write new ones.

The idea of discarding something you’ve written is sometimes referred to as “killing your darlings.” It’s a fact of life: when you write something, you often fall in love with it. It’s difficult to discard it, never to use it again. But a real writer — a professional who cares about the final product — shouldn’t be so in love with her work that she doesn’t edit out what doesn’t work. So I need to do some editing.

I have a plan of attack on my novel that isn’t fully fleshed out yet. Basically, I plan to ruthlessly cut away scenes that aren’t moving the plot forward. Some of them can be salvaged. For example, there’s a scene where John is taken on a tour of the ranch. Later, he takes a horseback ride that covers some of the same territory. Some of the places he sees on both trips are important later in the novel. But do I need to talk about them twice? No. I can cut out his first tour and keep the later one (not written yet). I can use some of the descriptions I’ve already written when I write the new material.

Another goal: kill the victim by page 50. Now I know I just told you that all the how-to books say the book should open at the murder scene with the victim already dead. But I’m not writing a murder mystery that’s just a puzzle for the readers. My story is also in entertain and inform. To do the job properly, I need to develop relationships between characters. And I can’t do that if one of the main characters is dead. Besides, I believe that by bringing the narrator into the story before the murder, I’m giving readers a clearer vision of what the events leading up to the murder are. They see what’s going on because the narrator sees what’s going on. The facts aren’t brought forward solely by the detective having question and answer sessions with witnesses and suspects. Instead, the reader is in on the plot.

Besides, I’ve read plenty of mysteries that started out with a live victim, so there’s obviously more than one way to get the job done.

But although I write for a living, I don’t write mystery novels for a living. That means I need to take care of my day job — writing computer how-to books and articles and building a helicopter tour business — first. To further complicate my life, a tenant recently trashed a rental property I’m trying to sell, and I’ve been spending a lot of time there, cleaning up her mess and dealing with contractors. So I don’t think I’ll be writing much more about Coyote Springs over the next week or two.

But I’ll be thinking about it, and that’s the most important part of writing any complex plot.