A Writer's Code Words: Discipline and Perseverance, by Susan Oleksiw

The warmer weather in New England means one thing in particular for me. I get to take my walk

without putting on boots, gloves, a hat, and a heavy coat, which by now so obviously needs a trip to the dry cleaner's that I'm embarrassed to wear it. In March and April I have the pleasure of walking unimpeded by heavy clothing. I can pretend that those sad looking crocuses really do promise the end of winter.

After months of miserable winter weather I can also enjoy nodding to other walkers, people who are strangers to me because I haven't seen them since last September. My husband and I both marvel at the number of people who get out for a walk on the first few warm days in March and April. But he's too preoccupied with the current problems of his printer to take it any further. Not me. I follow the thought right into the world of writing.

Today, in this mild day that feels like spring, but isn't, I kept thinking about two words, discipline and perseverance, which define the commitment to writing as well as to walking through the wintry days as well as the warm, sunny ones. These are the code words that keep writers going when we are sick of the story we're working on, no longer think it's worth finishing, or can't figure out how to finish it. The characters sound stupid and insipid, the plot has holes in it, and the sentences sink faster than the Lusitania. But we stick to it. We finish that story, that novel, that essay, and let it sit and age just long enough before we review and revise. And, to our utter amazement, the story isn't all that bad.

In every story I write there is a moment when I question if the story or novel is good enough. This is different from beginning a project and knowing that it isn't going to work; that's a professional judgment that comes after long hours of trying to get it right. Finishing a story requires the same steady determination that pushes the runner to add a mile this week and another one next week, or urges the walker to climb the snowbank to get to the road, or to avoid oncoming cars on an ice-slick street.

 

Right now I'm finishing up another Anita Ray mystery, and I can see the end. I don't want it to come too soon because I still have a lot of loose threads to tie together, and I want the bow to be neat and orderly. This takes another kind of discipline--the ability to restrain myself from bolting for the finish line. There is nothing worse than enjoying a story all the way through to the last few chapters and then have the writer rush the ending.

Anita Ray has grown into a thoughtful woman who assesses the world around her, gathers details into a larger picture, and readies herself for the confrontation. She isn't impulsive, though her Auntie Meena thinks otherwise, and she isn't reckless, though her fascination with violent death worries her relatives. She takes her time, sticks to her investigation, and holds on to the end. 

Discipline and perseverance.

These two words carry the runner, the walker, and the writer to the finish line.

What the Well-Dressed Character Will Wear, by Susan Oleksiw

A standard technique to introduce a new character is to provide a physical description--height, weight, hair color--with one unique feature, perhaps a broken nose or uneven shoulders. This is the easy part, but it is hardly enough if we want the reader to get a sense of how this person sees himself or herself in the world. We need to know more, and writers may progress to how the person shakes hands or drives a car. I include clothing in the details that have the potential for making a character vivid.

During a recent visit to a local mall, I found a spot where I could watch the shoppers and other people watchers. I spotted the senior citizens taking their daily walk, the young mothers with kids in tow, eager to get out of the house even if it meant carting half the neighborhood with them to the play room, and shoppers looking for--and finding--bargains. None of these individuals is real to you now reading this because I haven't given any remarkable detail. You don't know what they look like or how they behave.

Most of the characters who populate my fiction appear fully formed--I know what they look like and how they behave and what they believe. But I also want to know what they are wearing. Whatever the reason, I have to think harder about my characters' outfits. The only exception is Anita Ray, most recently in For the Love of Parvati. I understand her wardrobe well. She wears a full sari, a two-piece Kerala sari, or a salwar khameez set. Sometimes she wears western clothes--slacks and a khurta. In her case I only have to think about colors and patterns.

Western characters are more of a challenge. I am so used to seeing people wearing jeans and jerseys that I have to remind myself that there are other options. I find some of these at the mall or in restaurants or movie theaters. An especially good site for searching out wardrobe possibilities is the train station. I don't mind waiting for the less-regular train service leaving North Station in Boston because I take the time to study the outfits of professional women. They are varied and sometimes surprising.

Women have a far wider range in clothing now than in years past, and I have a few favorites. Many women still wear business suits, particularly those raised in traditional families determined to maintain hard-won family status. Deanie Silva, in Last Call for Justice, would only wear the most expensive but slightly conservative clothes. But her nieces would wear anything but. 

For the younger age group, which includes Jenny, Chief of Police Joe Silva's stepdaughter, I especially like the silk blouses with jeans, the black leather boots with flowery cotton dresses, the leggings on stick-thin legs with layers of tops, the leggings and long flowing skirts with cowboy shirts. Thought it's not for Sarah Souza, one of Joe's nieces, I have admired the white silk slip, with lace, worn underneath a red sweater embroidered with flowers. I can't say I have admired the combat boots worn with a khaki dress slung with empty gun holsters beneath lips pierced at least five times with silver studs but I remember the woman who wore the outfit. She may appear in another book, but not as a relative.

Whatever I may think of these outfits on a personal level (hint: they will never appear in my closet), I know I have a character who will love at least one of them. And however I describe her, with long brown hair or green eyes that recall Elizabeth Taylor's, the reader will remember the outfit that says, this young lady knows who she is. And that's how vivid I want my characters to be.

What I'm learning from Harper Lee

In the last few days I have read more than a dozen stories on the stunning news that Harper Lee at age 88 is about to publish her second book, which is in fact the first one she wrote. According to news reports the story in Go Set a Watchman covers the life of Scout as a young woman and relates the events in To Kill a Mockingbird in flashbacks. The setting is the 1930s and 1960s, during the Civil Rights Movement. Readers are eager to see what kind of person Scout grew up to be, and how contemporary life looked to Harper Lee. But there's a downside to this.

The flip side to the story is the history of the manuscript, which supposedly disappeared for fifty years. Lee set aside one novel and wrote another, her only book. Lee's sister managed her affairs until her recent death, and neither woman seemed interested in publishing Lee's first mss during all those years. But now something has changed. Lee's sister is dead and Lee is living in an assisted living center, after a stroke, and it's an open question of whether or not she understands what is happening.

While half the people I know are itching to get their fingers on the new book, I and other writers I know are wondering what this means for Harper Lee and her desire to determine her own literary reputation. If she wanted the book published, would she have done so earlier? Did she destroy all but one copy, a copy left with an editor and forgotten?

The question, put simply, is this: What do you do with your old, unsold mss when you realize someone else may one day take control of them?

Every writer has a number of mss stacked in a drawer or sitting in a box on a closet shelf. We may now have additional copies on disks, floating in a Cloud somewhere, or stored in a bank safe-deposit box. We may have tried to sell a particular mss and failed, or perhaps we decided we didn't like the story in the first place, or we knew it just wasn't good enough to go out into the world. Do we really want to see these mss published after we're gone? Or do we want to see them in print even while we're still around, only to see them land on a reviewer's desk with a thud?

Sometimes I start a story and find that it just doesn't go anywhere. I close out the file and turn to something else. Or I finish the story, fail to sell it, and forget about it until months, even years later, when I take another look. That's when I think, "Yes, it's a bad story and I'm glad no one bought it. I'm a better writer now." But I don't delete it from my computer.

This was the case with the first Anita Ray mystery, Under the Eye of Kali. I made several false starts in an effort to define the character and nature of the story. I rejected those stories, but I didn't delete them from my computer. I cannibalized another unfinished story for the second Anita Ray mystery, The Wrath of Shiva, but I didn't delete it from my computer.

Right now I'm working on an Anita Ray mystery novel whose title I stole from an earlier story. I'm not taking anything else from it for this novel, and I don't even want to reread the earlier work, just in case there's something there I can use. But I don't delete it from my computer.

I want to read the new Harper Lee novel, and I want to love, to admire it as much as Mockingbird. But I also don't want to be disappointed, or to think that someone has taken advantage of a declining writer and published something she felt didn't deserve the attention.

As writers we have a right to control our own reputations and output, to choose what we publish and ask others to read. Watching the story of Harper Lee's second novel, which was really her first, has convinced me that as difficult as it is, I'm going to delete old mss that I don't think are good enough to publish, or as good as what I'm writing now. Writers often hear the advice, Kill your darlings. The reference is usually to passages we are especially fond of. But I think now is the time to kill those other darlings, the old mss cluttering up our computers or gathering dust in the closet.

Revising the Reading List by Susan Oleksiw

Over the years my reading has expanded along what might seem predictable lines--lots of scholarly nonfiction, novels set in India, mysteries, and current nonfiction. I rarely read historical fiction though I enjoy history. Recently I read Ursula LeGuin's National Book Award speech, and was reminded that I had never read anything by her other than a few short stories.

As a child I read The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, and was put off by the governess's clearly unhinged state. In my view there was no ghost, just an unreliable woman losing her mind in an isolated country house. I told my older brother this and he remarked, you won't like science fiction or ghost stories. I took him at his word and happily entered the world of mysteries.

LeGuin's speech convinced me I'd been too quick to judge, and I picked up her first novel, Rocannon's World (1964). In a preface to a new edition the author remarked on how much her writing has changed, and as I read the story I could tick off the stages in the hero's journey without any effort. Still, I liked the author's robust attitude and her imagination.

Since I had no idea how LeGuin compared to other writers of science fiction, I decided to try C.S. Lewis. I had read Till We Have Faces (1956) in college, and knew about the Chronicles of Narnia, though they hadn't appealed to me as a child. I selected Out of the Silent Planet and fell in love with Dr. Ransom. When he sees the strange creature emerge from a body of water and begin talking, he loses all fear, and "his imagination leaped over every fear and hope and probability of his situation to follow the dazzling project of making a Malacandrian grammar." Of course! You laugh but I didn't. I knew exactly how Ransom felt. What Lewis shows us in the next several chapters is laid bare in language at the end, when Ransom discusses the nature of life on earth with Oyarsa after all three humans are brought before him and the people of the planet.

For several years I was a member of a book group, where I read authors whose works had never appealed to me, and for the most part still don't, but I found it very broadening to read and think about their words and articulate just what I didn't care for.

Last night I joined several other writers for the annual Mystery Night at the New England Mobile Book Fair. Not many readers in my area read about India, but I was pleasantly surprised when a few patrons listened to me talk about my Anita Ray books and decided to try them. India and Indian mysteries are as alien to many readers in this country as science fiction has long been to me. It's nice to pull down some walls, and get a closer look at the other side, from wherever you are standing.

Which kind of writer are you? by Susan Oleksiw

In honor of Independence Day I offer a question that most of us discover the answer to after writing for several years. Some writers begin with a series and stick with it. In each installment the protagonist, professional or amateur, investigates a crime and finds the culprit. Variety is found in the recurring minor characters who populate the established setting and those who appear as part of the particular mystery. In contrast is the writer who writes a few books in one series, writes a stand-alone, switches genres, and generally wanders from form to form, series to series, exploring and discovering.

Each approach to writing has its pluses and minuses. The writer who begins and sticks with one series character brings the reader into an established and known world, with old friends reappearing in new situations and more quirks in the main support figures. These books have enormous appeal for the way they take us into lives of people who come to seem like friends. Deborah Crombie has written fourteen Duncan Kincaid mysteries (with a fifteenth in the works),  and readers eagerly await her next story and the chance to revisit "old friends" Duncan and Gemma.

In contrast Laurie King has written three series and four stand-alone novels. Most mystery readers are familiar with the Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series that catapulted King to fame. The Kate Martinelli series brings readers back to California and the police procedural. The Stuyvesant and Grey books take the reader to Paris in the latest installment.

Aside from the sheer number of books these writers manage to produce, both are exploring crime and its aftermath in similar ways, going deeper into the lives of those affected as well as those investigating.

Which type of writer are you? Do you have one series and intend to stick with it over as many as twenty or thirty titles? Or do you like to explore different places and topics through different series characters as well as different genres?

Since I raised the question, I should answer it also. I began the Mellingham series with Murder in Mellingham (1993), and the sixth, Last Call for Justice, appeared in 2012. I introduced Anita Ray, an Indian American photographer living in South India at her aunt's tourist hotel, in a short story in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine in 2003. The first full-length Anita Ray mystery, Under the Eye of Kali, appeared in 2010. The third in the Anita Ray series, For the Love of Parvati, appeared in May 2014. 

I admit that I like switching back and forth and seeing similar problems from different perspectives, cultural as well as personal. I enjoy exploring the New England world, life along the coast and its special problems. But I also lived in India and have a great passion for exploring as much as I can of that world. In addition, I've written a number of short stories about a village in a rural area of New England. One story is available, Love Takes a Detour, with others to follow.

Now it's your turn. Which kind of mystery writer are you? Do you focus on one series, or do you try different things, different series characters and different genres?

To find Susan's novels, go to http://www.amazon.com/Susan-Oleksiw/e/B001JS3P7C

To learn more about Susan and her work, go to www.susanoleksiw.com