Laurie R. King

Award-winning, bestselling, thought-provoking mysteries

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The Rewrite

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Laurie King is not, as regular followers of this blog will know, a writer who outlines her books before she begins them.  Some people call this being a pantser (as in, by the seat of her…) but I refer to it as Organic, as opposed to the Organized outliner.

(In our writing manual Crime and Thriller Writing, my more Organized co-author and I came up with these terms after starting with more, shall we say, judgmental labels. I had to admit that there’s no point in alienating the outliners by calling them “anal”.)

At any rate, my brain doesn’t work by planning out a story before it starts. I’ll sometimes list a sequence of events, to keep an upcoming section in order, but when it gets more than a chapter or two into the future, I feel the fog descend, the blindfold tighten.

That means, the rewrite is where the novel is actually written.  A first draft is a short, meandering, half-developed heap of paper that no one but an experienced editor can make any sense out of.  Its main job, for writers like me, is to lay out the machinery of the plot, to set its unadorned and largely meaningless pieces in order and make sure that the events and people mesh.  The rewrite is when that….okay, call it an outline, even though it’s a 300-page one—is turned from a list of events involving half-developed characters into a full-blooded narrative with people we care about.

Again, some writers produce a first draft by throwing in everything including the kitchen sink, the cleaning supplies beneath it, and the dirty dishes waiting to go into the dishwasher.  I write a sparse first draft.  The oft-given rule of “Cut every third word” would leave me with short stories.  Instead, my second draft puts on maybe thirty percent of its original length, for a final version of 400-450 pages.

But I do cut.  And often, it hurts to put stuff into the Cuts folder.  Clever asides, interesting speculations, material that develops a back-story… chop.

I do always go back through that Cuts folder, to make sure there’s nothing there that’s really too good, too illuminating, too intriguing to leave out.  And I almost never find anything worth fighting to find a place for.

Every so often, I have a battle with my editor over cutting material.  Sometimes I hold out, and make only the briefest of compromises.  Other times I let them take the argument, because really, was Stephen King’s The Stand a better book once he succeeded in getting its massive cuts put back in?  I sure didn’t think so.  Sometimes editors are right.

But it also means I occasionally have material that can go into the supplemental pages.  I don’t know that I’ll have much from my Riviera Gold Cuts folder—certainly nothing like the vastly whittled-down Testimony that got pulled out of The Language of Bees (which, if you haven’t seen, is the second link here)—but it’s possible.

But if I end up with a scene where Russell dances the Charleston and I have to cut it, I promise to put it on the book’s page.  Just for you guys.

(Other blog posts about the craft of writing are here.)

Hitting SEND

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One of the most satisfying sounds of my earlier years was the rustle and thump of an envelope holding 300+ pages of manuscript as it dropped into the FedEx box.  Of course, now that contracts no longer specify paper copies, the physical thump has been replaced by a tap on an icon.

But it’s still satisfying. Deeply, joyously satisfying, this story that began with a throwaway line towards the end of one book (The Murder of Mary Russell)–

–and was then more or less ignored all through the next–

–but which then started to come to life at my last stop in a tour of Europe, when I arrived at my hotel to find this subtle indication that I was not in Romania any more:

And later looked out my window at this:

Then the next day, when I wandered down to gawk at the Casino–

–Mrs Hudson’s appreciation for Monte Carlo began to take shape, in what would become Riviera Gold.

That’s the rewrite I’ve just hit SEND on.  So although it’s far from finished, since editor and copy editor have yet to push things around, it’s currently off my desk and onto theirs. Which is a beautiful feeling, not least because I’ve been working 8-9 hour days on the thing for more weeks than I can remember, and I have laundry to do and heaps of things that need sorting.

And maybe I’ll even have a chance to see my family, other than through the bleary eyes of a writer on deadline.

Happy December to you, too!

(If you’d like to demonstrate your excitement about the book, it’s always great when my publisher can see pre-orders, from Bookshop Santa Cruz or Poisoned Pen books or your local Indie or B&N or Amazon. Just in case you want to show them how much you’re looking forward to June 9…)

Tender is the Prose

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As part of my general research on the next Russell & Holmes novel, I re-read the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel Tender is the Night.

And frankly, I found it very hard going.  Meandering plot, puzzling metaphors, characters distorted to fit into the roles he needs for them.

Start with his take on women.  The book is supposed to be about them—the girl who falls in love, the woman who goes insane—but even for a 1930s writer, he has a completely tin ear when it comes to how women actually work.  For example, here about the young (17 when we meet her) actress who falls in love with a married man:

Rosemary was from the middle of the middle class, catapulted by her mother onto the uncharted heights of Hollywood. Their point of resemblance to each other and their difference from so many American women, lay in the fact that they were all happy to exist in a man’s world—they preserved their individuality through men and not by opposition to them. They would all three have made alternatively good courtesans or good wives not by the accident of birth but through the greater accident of finding their man or not finding him.

Where does one start with such a statement? Were American women in fact unhappy about existing in a man’s world, or did they just shrug and get on with things? Is a good wife like a good courtesan? How does a person preserve her individuality through another person?
And later:

They came out of the neat restored trench, and faced a memorial to the Newfoundland dead. Reading the inscription Rosemary burst into sudden tears. Like most women she liked to be told how she should feel, and she liked Dick’s telling her which things were ludicrous and which things were sad.

Really?  So, girls—do we like to be told how to feel?  Or do most men like to believe we’re so childlike, we need to be led into such realization?

Then there are the sentences—dozens and dozens of them—that sound clever, and feel as if the author is proud of them, but are actually baffling.  Such as this, about Rosemary’s mother / stage manager:

One of her husbands had been a cavalry officer and one an army doctor, and they both left something to her that she tried to present intact to Rosemary. By not sparing Rosemary she had made her hard—by not sparing her own labor and devotion she had cultivated an idealism in Rosemary, which at present was directed toward herself and saw the world through her eyes.

Huh?  Or when the man Rosemary wants to seduce first kisses her in a taxi, then turns her down:

Her face drooped with dismay and disappointment and Dick said automatically, “We’ll have to simply—” He stopped himself, followed her to the bed, sat down beside her while she wept. He was suddenly confused, not about the ethics of the matter, for the impossibility of it was sheerly indicated from all angles but simply confused, and for a moment his usual grace, the tensile strength of his balance, was absent.

“I knew you wouldn’t,” she sobbed. “It was just a forlorn hope.”

Should I know what the tensile strength of his balance means?  Would any young woman actually say forlorn hope?  Did he think it clever to insert, after a long interruption, the blithe phrase “To resume Rosemary’s point of view…”  Is there some reason why Rosemary is sitting on the beach trying to avoid talking to one group of people while admiring another, and then suddenly she’s out in the water with one of the swimmers? “Nicole” goes from the most stable person on the page to a complete raving lunatic.  Some characters we find sympathetic, then they turn loathsome—and vice versa with others.

I do realize that literary fiction tends to have different rules from genre storytelling, but please.

Anyone else out there have problems with some of the classics?

 

Write and rewrite

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[Sorry all, the rewrite workshop is the 29th, not the 22nd. Brain fever…]

Today I hit the (theoretical) 2/3 mark in the new Russell & Holmes novel!  Not that 201 pages is a novel–even 301 pages isn’t–but there’s a rhythm to a book that I get to know, and 200 is a good, solid mark.

I also want to let you know that there are still some seats left in the workshop I’m teaching on the rewrite process on June 22. I’ll be using sections of my own work, including this very Work In Progress.  If you or someone you know are interested in the rewrite stage, I’m in San Francisco on June 22—signup is here.

Halfway to a Russell…

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The last couple years of my writing life have been a bit like having my laptop set up in front of one of those machines that spits balls down the length of a cage at a person holding a bat.

It’s not impossible, to dodge, hit, or field the missiles and toss them back while trying to create a story, but it can be somewhat distracting. And I do find that  I can handle two or three interruptions in a morning and still go back to the words–although when it comes to four or five, eventually my brain says Hey, look, can we go do something else?

Which makes milestones (if you’ll pardon the confusion of metaphors here) all the more important, either when they’re off on the horizon, or when they’re reached, and falling behind.

Yesterday I hit one of those nice, round, if meaningless and deceptive milestones: the more or less halfway point of a theoretical first draft. My first drafts are a kind of expanded outline, whose purpose is to set up the machinery of the plot and to sketch in the characters.  A first draft is not a novel. Mine are rubbish, utterly unreadable for anyone but an experienced editor.  For this stage, I aim at 300 pages.  Since the final manuscript will be over 400 pages, it gives an idea of how very skeletal the story is in its early form.

(And incidentally, that doubling up of metaphorical imagery–baseballs and mile markers–is not a bad illustration of the difference between a clumsy first draft and a hammered-down final one.)

But: I now have 150 pages that I didn’t have at the beginning of March. Better yet, there are no conferences, Mystery Writers of America workshops, book festivals, or trips to New York coming at me from down the other end of the batting cage. Which means that with a touch of luck, I may be able to keep my head down and write.

Here’s hoping I don’t get knocked off my seat by anything thrown at me by the pitching machine of life.

Beginnings: a Kate Martinelli story

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Only five weeks after I’d hoped to finish it, I now have this:

Beginnings

A Kate Martinelli story by

Laurie R. King

Please note: story, not novel.  See the thickness of that stack of pages? This is a 115 page novella, not a full-sized book. I don’t have a pub date for it yet. But this is how it opens–yes, in Kate’s first person voice:

All stories begin.  A newborn’s wail, a doctor’s news, the scream of brakes on the road outside—with most stories, there’s a place where you can look back and say, that’swhere it started: where I met the guy, where I decided the life, where I took one turn and not the other.

And I heard once (probably from Lee, she tells me most of those things that stick in my brain) that a good story loops together its end with its opening.

I’ve been a homicide cop most of my life.  I know all about stories that are both an end and a beginning, because someone else’s end is where I generally come in.  For the victim’s family, that chapter of their lives opens with a 3 am ring on their phone or doorbell.  But this one I’m telling you about is my life, not my job—which means that I was on the receiving end of one of those moments, too.

Writing retreat

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So, day one of a very brief writing retreat: the good is that it’s gray and cool enough that I’m interested in staying indoors summoning words, at least until the sun comes out this afternoon.

The bad is that the house doesn’t seem to have a coffeemaker.

A writer’s hideaway

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I need to write. I have two short pieces and a lot of thinking to do, and it’s hard to put words on the screen or thoughts in order when life is its usual chaotic self. So I’ve come to the coast for a few days, to write, here:

I’ll let you know how it turns out…

 

Lockdown & New Guinea

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One of the earliest sections written in what eventually became Lockdown was a story set in Papua New Guinea. I spent some months there in late 1970s, on my honeymoon (because yes, what else do academics do for a honeymoon than go visit a Stone Age community?) which makes for one of those illustrations that a writer never knows what odd elements of her past will find their way into a book.

For example, the sing-sing

and the pig kill to celebrate a bride price ceremony

and the salt ponds, where logs are soaked in a saline pond in order to harvest the salty ash, and where a waitpela comes to grief in the story.

As proof of my travel, here I am in a motorized dugout canoe on the Sepik River

and admiring a Bird of Paradise in a sanctuary:

I had a Pidgin teacher named Yasmin—that’s my husband in a shirt my mother made him, a rainbow embroidered across the back.

Later, that same cottage, with a rainbow of its own.

And although this isn’t an Air Niugini flight, it is very like the tiny airplane Linda met when she flew up into there mission in the highlands.

Yep: a person never knows what from her past will come back when a story begins.

Which, come to think of it, is pretty much what Lockdown is all about.

***

You can get Lockdown in paper now from your local Independent bookshop; Barnes & Noble; or Amazon.

 

Cole Porter & Sherlock Holmes, Misbehaving

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Whenever I set out to write one of my 1920s novels, I first choose the location, then rummage around to see who was there at the time. I’ve come across some fascinating characters that way–characters in both senses of the word: Sabine Baring-Gould in Dartmoor; Dashiell Hammett in San Francisco; Marshal Lyautey in Morocco—real life, all of them. People I probably couldn’t have made up.

Not that I don’t create characters from scratch. These are novels, not thinly fictionalized histories—but stirring in well-known places and faces can ground a story, giving (as Gilbert & Sullivan admitted) artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.

Then sometimes, one of those actual people elbows aside my own created ones to seize center stage.

Such as Cole Porter. When I started writing Island of the Mad…

[read the rest on Dear Reader, here.]

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Order information:

US edition—signed, from Poisoned Pen Books; signed, from Bookshop Santa Cruz;signed (as tip-in pages) from Barnes & Noble.

Unsigned from your local Indie;from Amazon/Kindle;from Barnes & Noble/Nook.

UK edition—from Allison & Busby;from Heffer’s.

Or download the audiohere.

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