Janice MacDonald's Blog: Notes on writing - Posts Tagged "janice-macdonald"

The easiest part of writing a book is actually writing the book. Once it has winged its way to the publisher, been edited back and forth several times, received a cover, been printed and sent to bookstores, you are suddenly required to become what most writers became writers to avoid in he first place: social.

Sometimes you are asked to read a passage from your book — which can be tricky for mystery writers, as you don't want to give too much away. Sometimes you appear on a panel that has marginal ties to the themes in your book, where you have to deliver expert opinions and vacillate between hoping you are not ignored by questions from the audience, and wondering if you actually can come up with any answers. Mostly, you are asked to appear and sign books, which can be very nice when you run across people who have liked your other books and are pleased at the chance to speak with you. When no one knows who you are, it is best to have an idea of where the self-help section in the bookstore is, and whether or not there is a public washroom, as those are the only questions you may be asked.

Whatever the case, public situations call for a great deal of thought and preparation. As my friend and mentor, Cora Taylor, once summed it up, "What to wear, what to wear, what to wear?" Although most of us schlub about in old university sweatpants and comfy, oversized flannel shirts when at home writing, the public assumes that we will appear exotic and interesting. Only some of us can pull that off with any sort of consistency.

Shirley, a poet friend of mine, has a great store of "writerly earrings" which I drool over. Cora, queen of Young Adult novels, sweeps in with various layers of silks and leathers. Candas, my speculative fiction-writing bestie, has a crazy mock fur coat that only she could pull off. Conni, the playwright, does scarves better than anyone I know. And me? Well, I guess you're just going to have to come out and see!

Please visit my official website for information about upcoming appearances and more details about my latest book, Hang Down Your Head: A Randy Craig Mystery.

Why do writers write? It's certainly not for a chance at immediate response, though when it does come — like it did today, in the form of a colleague popping over to my cubicle to say, "I just finished your latest and loved it. I'm starting on the one about computers now" — it's lovely. It's not for the money, either, though I am pretty sure most writers make more money than I do. And it's certainly not for glory or respect; after all, one of my own children has never read any of my books.

But I'll let you in on a moment that explains why writing is the whole reason, in and of itself.

Looking for a setting that made sense for the mystery novel storyline I'm presently working on, I recalled a place my mother once taught back in the days of teacherages and one-room schoolhouses. I knew the original site was no longer there, but needed to know what was along that road, so that I could fabricate with impunity (loose translation: make shit up) and then pop in one of those nice little poetic licence commentaries at the end about how I'd made everything up. My husband and I made plans to take a drive out that way to look around.

While waiting for my husband to wake up on the holiday Monday, I decided to write the passage the way I wanted it to be, figuring it would be easier to edit later than waste time. I decided that as well as inventing a standing schoolhouse that would now be a museum/meeting hall, I needed a historic marker on the highway, one of those pullover sites that contain a garbage pail and a sign detailing the important event that took place in the vicinity — perhaps even a map. My mom used to make a point of stopping to read these markers, all over the country, and it's become a habit with me, too. I decided I would have Randy Craig and her friend Denise pull into the layby to get away from a tractor pulling a huge load of hay bales and find something important. Randy would read the map on the sign, and things would come clearer by the minute. I got eight pages written in the silence of the early morning.

Around 9:30, after a quick breakfast, we headed out and drove into the blue Alberta day. It took us just over an hour to get to the highway we were aiming for. I grinned when we passed MacDonald Road, thinking that if I was someone who believed in omens, this would be a good one. A little later on, near where the school would have stood, had it still been there, we noticed a small historic marker arrow. We pulled off the road, and there it was: the historic marker sign — with a map. It wasn't quite as I had described earlier in my imagination. And there was no garbage can. But as I stood there, taking photos and trying to quell the shivers I get when my worlds mesh, a tractor hauling a truckload of hay bales drove slowly by.

That's the magic of writing.

Janice has contributed a guest blog entitled "The Smell of the Grease Paint" to Type M for Murder, an excellent site run by top Canadian crime writers. Thanks especially to writerly pal Barbara Fradkin for the invitation!

Read Janice's piece here:
"The Smell of the Grease Paint"

My husband and I been binge-watching some television series recently, and we've noticed that it somehow feels much easier to live in the world of a British series than it does an American one. Much of this I think has to do with the level of authenticity offered. British actors, on the whole, seem less airbrushed, don't you think?

Authenticity may be an odd thing to wish for in fiction, and yet even though we know it's make believe, there needs to be a knell of truth to the experience. That is why Randy Craig ages over the span of her stories, from a young-ish grad student in her first adventure to a middle-aged woman in her latest. It's also why she worries about her choices and decisions, and why she doubles back on herself on occasion. Many of those elements of characterization are incremental layers to the formula, as well. It is important to take the audience along on the quest, but a quest that goes in a straight line is satisfying to no one, neither detective reader or football fan. Real people second guess themselves five or six times a day, if not an hour. (I almost erased this whole page three times already.)

Vulnerability in our heroes is something we embrace warily. We think we want Superman. More often, though, we veer to the tortured Batman. Contemporary detective fiction is a world without the astonishing August Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot or Philo Vance — who seem impossibly outrageous if placed in a modern context — and without their stalwart if duller sidekicks. It is a world in which ordinary people pit themselves against extraordinary circumstances. If you are lucky, a writer will enhance that formula with explorations of that detective's psyche, circumstances or political position in the world. That is when it becomes really fun to immerse yourself in their world.

I'm not saying we need to read a shelf full of anti-heroes, that characters have to be representative of some great political ideal, or that we can’t make our detectives into attractive figures. If you're asking a reader to live with them for a while, though, it helps to make your characters into someone they'd like to have a cup of coffee and some bread pudding with. I’m looking for someone who isn't airbrushed and who, like me, will have to walk off that last dessert.

Great news, mystery lovers! Ravenstone Books/Turnstone Press, publisher of the Randy Craig Mystery series, is sponsoring a giveaway right here on Goodreads!

Get all the details and enter for your chance to win a copy of the new novel at this link:

https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sh...