Wednesday: on writing

Rather, on non-writing. One of the most frustrating things about being a writer is when you can’t. I’m not talking about being blocked by internal inabilities—“writer’s block.” I’m talking about what Lao Tse (he must have raised small children) called the “the ten thousand things.” I was spinning along just fine with the current novel—working…

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H.R.F. Keating

I was going to talk about research today, but HRF Keating has died, a friend and a writer I admired tremendously, and so this Wednesday’s Mutterings will be about him. I met Harry when I was a very new writer, at a conference in Scottsdale.  A couple years later, he came to the Monterey BoucherCon with…

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The conference as tool

Wednesdays here on Mutterings are about the writing process, from nouns to e-readers.  Today, since I’m in Santa Fe for Left Coast Crime, I thought I’d talk about the conference as part of a writer’s life. We’re a solitary species, we writers.  Except for a few of us who work in tandem, and for those…

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Clothes make the (wo)man

We are instructed not to judge a book by its cover, and yet we do all the time.  I once had a publisher tell me he initially rejected one of my books because he disliked the US cover, although later he adored the story.  And if a publisher falls for what a cover has to…

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The novel as house

Writing is sometimes compared to other art forms: a novel as a painting (or mural), a short story as a deft watercolor.  Personally, I think the closest parallel to writing a novel is designing a house. If I had not been a novelist, I would love to have been an architect. (My friend SJ Rozan…

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Turning the (calendar) page

Wednesdays with Laurie is a series of writing reflections, here on Mutterings, every—yes—Wednesday.  Topics are random, although I expect that cumulatively, they will touch on most of what I have to say about the craft. Today: the time line. I haven’t seen the film cliché of the flipping pages of a calendar used for a while,…

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Early days

As the final pass of Pirate King through my hands comes nearer—the galley proofs will reach me in a couple or three weeks—the next book begins to stir into life.  This week I will take the first steps in a book that won’t become a reality for the rest of the world for a year…

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Verb upgrade

I’m writing a short story at the moment, and it’s reached the point where I’m looking over the words themselves.  Part of the story is narrated by a precise kind of a person, who uses (as per last week’s post) nouns—or nominal phrases—that are specific rather than general: Langstroth boxes, not beehives; Gladstone bag rather…

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Now we are six

I’m not a big one for anniversaries and birthdays (sorry, kids) but it occurred to me this morning that I started this blog in February, and indeed, when I went looking, I found that last Thursday, Mutterings turned six.  Interestingly, my first post (here) was about the lack of women in book awards (based on…

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Our friend, the noun

My mind being on the how-to of writing at present, I thought I’d post some reflections on various aspects of the craft.  I’ll try to put them up Wednesdays, so as to add some structure to all our busy lives, as well as to give myself the deadline I seem to require to get anything…

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