Curiosity does not kill my cats

I first heard people praise layering as an aesthetic concept when my daughter was learning to paint in high school. That would have been about 10 years ago - at least that is when the concept of layers penetrated my imagination. And my analysis. But I have discovered that it is a semantic description of something I already understood - that it is efficient and powerful to accomplish multiple objectives at once. And that sometimes I still benefit from the many Marxist professors who made up my undergraduate experience as a sociology major....because layering is synergy applied to art.

But layering does not happen without a foundational canvas or concept. And Voila! I believe I have identified a key obstacle that has been hindering my momentum in writing Stuck in the Mud. I have invented many layers but I had not chosen a base upon which to apply them.

The aha moment came when I was mapping the characters' relationships between each other. I discovered that the person I thought should be at the center of the map did not fit there. I have been attempting to fit the story around the wrong character. The central character is not Aileen. It is her father, Dan, whose floating corpse floated washed up at the Ste. Genevieve marina.

But that makes the story philosophically an exercise in the passive voice. And that makes me curious. And curiosity, for me, is an essential ingredient - a core commitment. Curiosity does not kill my cats. It makes them interesting.

So now I know that Stuck in the Mud will use the format of a murder mystery to profile a spiritually abusive contemporary Christian leader in the same was that Pastor's Ex-Wife narrates the road to recovery of a woman who had been married to a spiritually abusive Protestant pastor. Both are built around the victim's story.

If I write Stuck in the Mud well, the reader may end up with an unresolved question as to who the victim really is.....

Meta-cognition and Story Structure

When I write a poem I usually impose a stringent structure on myself - it may be a rhyme scheme, a recurring pattern of syllables, or some other combinations of devices that make it necessary to craft and recraft the piece before it is finished. This has assisted me in some mysterious, serendipitous fashion, to discover my true intent, pushed as I am to make the piece work - as with solving a Sudoku, there is one right set of answers even though the building blocks rearrange themselves forever.

I had a similar set of rules, a template, if you will, for each chapter when I wrote Pastor's Ex-Wife. Each chapter had to advance the plot and also contain:

• A church service - using a fictitious construct which was a composite of a different church building, congregation, pastor, and service
• An anecdote from when I taught music in an inner city elementary school district
• A metaphor or symbol that carried the psychological/emotional impact of the chapter
• Dialogue

I have a similar set of rules for a historical novel - the working title is Isabel -that is based on a series of letters written in 1894 between Benjamin Edwards and Isabel Woods. Most of the research for that book is done but I am not ready to write it yet. However, I can watch it unfold in my mind as though the book were a dance choreographed for the stage - each chapter is one day in the week before Isabel dies. When I do write it, I think it will flow fairly freely - at least for the first draft.

My current struggle is with Stuck in the Mud. It is a murder mystery - think "cozy", not "thriller." But I want to incorporate big issues into the story - the pain that spiritually abusive marriages cause the children, how gender issues play out in today's American Protestant churches, and how the issues of class, philanthropy, and status intertwine in the context of a nonprofit organization. The setting is contemporary Ste. Genevieve, Missouri - the Bolduc House Museum, in fact, so at some level I hope that the novel will be a marketing device for both the museum and the town. There are three corpses: one in St. Louis, one washing up at the Mississippi River marina in Ste. Genevieve, and one accidentally plowed up behind one of the houses at the museum. The requisite but uncertain romantic sub-theme is there.

I'm thinking that the plot itself has to be the driver of Stuck in the Mud....unlike the shifting settings and symbols of Pastor's Ex-Wife, or the character-driven Strindberg-like expose of Isabel. So for me, the task of planning Stuck in the Mud is unexpectedly the most difficult writing task I have undertaken to date.

So much for a writer's meta-cognitive process, right?

Historical Needles in Archival Haystacks

Yesterday I attended a women's club meeting at lunch and happened to mention that I am writing a mystery set in our town to a friend who was sitting across from me. So, rather than taking in the information and making it perhaps cause for a small conversation she shouted the information down the table. To my surprise, everyone seemed impressed and ready to read the finished product even though it truly is months away.

Rather than inspire me to write the next section, I came home tired after another meeting took care of dinner. I thought that today I would get back to it.

Grump grump grump. Today again, work turned frustrating and a bit overwhelming because a departing professional staff member leaves in three days so we spent the morning going over each of her tasks, responsibilities, and projects. To make my headache go away after I actually finished my must do list, I did something somewhat mindless.

I started an index card file of the specific dates, events, and decisions on record in the Ste. Genevieve Archive. The records are random. Deeds are with deeds and concessions with concessions but the file for 1765 can be next to one from 1800. For the past few years I have been reading through looking for historical needles in archival index haystacks. Today I invented a way to sort them that will allow anyone to meander in a more intuitive and chronological sequence.

Since my work always involves story and the work of the museum is to accurately interpret our 18th century site, taking the time to place each detail in the context of companion details is important and filled an afternoon that needed to be more low key than if I had started making a bunch of cold calls, for instance.

This is what actually happens in the planning phase of every story. Before I write the next section of Stuck in the Mud I will have figured out the sequence of the main details and then I'll improvise the dialog and sensory connections as I string the details in their sequence whether that is truly chronological or not. That's what happened as I wrote Pastor's Ex-Wife too. After knowing the big picture of the book, each chapter becomes, for me, its own project.

The missing ingredient for me today is energy....however, I can probably weave in some of the eighteenth century details as I write Stuck in the Mud and my adventure to Potosi tomorrow will definitely find its way into the story.

Staying Motivated to Write & Accountable

I solved two problems related to my personal motivation to write - which is challenged by the energy it takes to do my full time responsibilities as a museum director well -not to mention that a chunk of every day at work is spent writing for work. My motivational problem deals with writing MY stuff!

This morning I realized that when I wrote Pastor's Ex-Wife I was assisted by Lisa and her husband, Gavin.
Whenever I finished a chapter, I emailed it to them. They read and responded and their issues and encouragement kept me enthused. So, my first task today was to identify an accountability partner a.k.a. reader/responder. Thanks Audrey.

My second task was to come up with a working title: Stuck in the Mud. Then I revisited the 5,000 words already written and integrated foreshadowing for the third corpse and also upgraded a character to a prospective boyfriend for Aileen.

That accomplished, I checked out and revised my website for the first time since last March. Now I'm waiting for homemade French onion soup to cook enough to put the bread and cheese on and throw the pot under the broiler for a few minutes. Yummmy.