Favorite Writing Exercises by Susan Oleksiw

Like many other writers, I spent a few years teaching writing, among other subjects, to people of all ages--college students on up to retired folks and occasionally middle and high school students in weekend workshops. Each class was different, but I relied on several favorite writing exercises to get students writing. I still find myself thinking of them when I face a particular challenge in a manuscript. Here are a few I think are worth trying, no matter where you are in your career.

First, write one descriptive paragraph for each of three people: someone you know very well; someone you have seen in the neighborhood but have never met; and someone you make up.

Second, write a three-page dialogue of two people meeting for lunch, or a coffee break. One is unhappy with his/her job, and the other is satisfied with work.

Third, what is a zipper and how does it work?

Fourth, write the opening page of a short story or novel from the point of view of each of the main characters in the story.

Fifth, if you are a woman, describe your Saturday morning as if you were a man. If you are a man, describe your Saturday morning as if you were a woman.

Sixth, write about things that are silver.

In each exercise, the writer is challenged to observe and record, to think through a specific behavior or incident. In a good story, there is no room for anything vague or unclear, and the greater specificity or detail, the more compelling and involving the narrative.

In For the Love of Parvati, the third Anita Ray mystery, I open with a scene of peril, a man tied under a bridge in a rural area, with the monsoon raging and a river starting to flood. The idea came from an effort to describe a bridge I encountered and how unstable parts of it had become over the decades while other parts looked as sturdy as the day they were constructed. I liked the contrast, and out of that came the opening scene.

In the second Anita Ray book, The Wrath of Shiva, Anita has several conversations with people she is trying to get information from. The key to a strong dialogue is creating the tension between two people who have different goals. Anita goes from store to store, and her goals clash with each storekeeper's.

 

In the first Anita Ray, Under the Eye of Kali, the opening scene at a breakfast table introduces several women, some of whom I imagined and others whom I had seen in the States or in India. Only the waiter is real.

Readers pick up a book looking for an experience, and it is the writer's job to create that experience, that journey into another world. These exercises are steps on creating that journey.

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.

Six Steps for a Book Launch

In May, Five Star will publish For the Love of Parvati, the third book in the Anita Ray series, featuring  Indian American photographer Anita Ray, who lives in South India at her aunt’s tourist hotel. Anita first appeared in a short story published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, “A Murder Made in India,” in the October 2003 issue. Since then, eleven more Anita Ray stories have appeared in AHMM and Level Best Books anthologies, with another in the pipeline.

Now that the book is written, my job is to launch it on what I hope is a very successful path. Launching a book, as most writers now, is almost as much work as writing it, but I have a few established practices that help me get the word out and generate sales.

1. I compile a list of professional reviewers and review sites, invite them to review the ARC. (These do not duplicate those contacted by Five Star.) Some say yes, and some say no. I send the ARCs out about two to three months in advance, depending on the reviewer. I also ask colleagues, friends, and local reviewers to review. I also do giveaways on Goodreads and LibraryThing. Depending on the reviewer, I may include a letter from the publisher indicating the type of story, etc. This year I have 45 ARCs for the third Anita Ray, almost twice what I had for the second book.

2. I order updated bookmarks with the cover of the new book. I give these to everyone, and even put them into reply envelopes for bills, etc. I also make sure I have enough business cards. I put cards and bookmarks on every chair at a book event (if there is seating), and hand them out at events like book fairs. For reasons that elude me, I find it easy to hand these out to strangers at events when I normally wouldn’t even say hello to a stranger.

3. I begin setting up events--talks, panels, etc., anything that gets my name out there and gives me a chance to interact with other people. I admit that I don’t do as many of these as I used to, but I’ve found a variety of events is more useful to me than a high number of traditional events like library panels.

4. I use social media, so I'll be posting regularly on my own blog plus do a few guest blogs. I post on FB and I am learning to use Pinterest, especially since I have wonderful covers. I don’t use these sites to sell my book. Instead I talk about writing, what I love about India, and other interests. No one wants to get constant requests to “like” my page, show up at my “virtual” launch, and the rest of it. If I haven’t something interesting to say about writing and other topics, then it’s better for me not to write.

5. This one is harder, but I recommend it if you can pull it off. I recently sold another short story featuring Anita Ray to Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. This will probably be published in the coming year, which will reinforce interest, I hope, in the novel For the Love of Parvati, coming out in May 2014, as well as the two previous books, Under the Eye of Kali (2010) and The Wrath of Shiva (2012).

6. I use Wattpad to introduce readers to my series characters by posting short short stories for free. I also have posted the opening scene from a longer work, with a link to the site where the reader can buy the whole book. Unless you’re a very well known writer, it takes time to build up a readership on this site, but it does build.

Like almost any other writer, I would rather be writing than promoting. I doubt I will ever get over the feeling of foolishness of talking about myself and my books. But once in a while, to my great delight, I strike up a conversation with someone who loves all sorts of mysteries, India, Indian food, and meeting strangers. That’s when I don’t care if the person buys my book or not because I'm enjoying the conversation so much, and that’s when he or she usually does buy it.

The first two books in the series are available as eBooks and in paper through Amazon. You can read an Anita Ray story at www.susanoleksiw.com