Missing the Clam Juice

I do not enjoy gratuitous sex scenes in novels. In fact, I see very little reason for there ever to be explicit descriptions of such activity. Nuance and innuendo works just fine for me as a reader. But, now that I have moved on to writing the second chapter of Stuck in the Mud, I find myself wondering how essential it is to make the protagonist - Aileen, in this case- the victim of some violent targeted effort to get her off the track of the killer or killers. Perhaps it is expected. But is it a must-have ingredient for a successful mystery novel?

I resist following patterns, recipes, or the usual procedures when there is obvious space for creativity.

People who have known me for a long time understand that they will never get exactly the same recipe twice when they eat at my house. I may knit dozens of Christmas stockings but I'll never use the same design twice. I love to read cookbooks but I don't make the meals described. I read them for the ideas - this spice goes with that set of ingredients, this technique makes that effect, this tool produces that result... If I eat something at a restaurant that I like I'll try to duplicate it at home and usually succeed on the first try.

The longest it ever took me to figure out a recipe was for the pasta con broccoli at the Rich & Charlie's restaurant in St. Louis. The ingredient that nearly stumped me was clam juice.

So writing this first mystery novel - hopefully this first of a series of mystery novels- feels a lot like recreating that pasta recipe. I'm trying to identify and properly incorporate the essential ingredients and I hope I'm not missing the clam juice.

Deconstructing the first chapters...

Mrs. Vesey, was my first writing critic and she was a harsh one. I resented every paper that she demanded me to rewrite but I was determined to get A's so as my sophomore English teacher in highschool she had the power to keep pushing me in spite of my teenage ego and entitlement mentality. I already knew I wanted to be a writer and I wrote for fun even then. At least Mrs.Vesey credited me with some writing ability which is why she pushed me and I am grateful for it.

My next critic was harsher, more judgmental, and less relational. She was another English teacher, a Scottish woman at the girls boarding school I attended in England as a high school exchange student during my senior year. I've forgotten her name. Her opinion was that no American high school student could write. It pained her to admit that "for an American...." I wrote pretty well.

Today I value people who are willing to read and ruthlessly critique what I write. Too many are overly impressed to know someone who is a writer to contribute meaningful criticism. I think my ego has been somewhat mitigated  with age and rejection slips....

Today I decided to reread the first several chapters of Stuck in the Mud now that I have done surgery on the plan for the murder mystery. I thought I could refine a few sentences and move on. But I discovered that the story moves too slowly and does not provide the quirky particulars that will make the characters live in our imaginations long after the book is finished. So I am my own critic.

Here's what I am going to try to do. I think that the manuscript to date is fine but that each paragraph needs to become several pages or a chapter in its own right. I need to deconstruct what I have written, add humor, dialogue, and incorporate the character's backstories. Adding action and making it much more fast-paced. 

Ok, so I totally changed the beginning. It feels more like a murder mystery - the beginning has to be like jumping off the cliff into a deep swimming hole. Then you have to figure out how to get out of the water safely.... Here's the first sentence:
"Aileen's shoes and the two feet inside them were stuck in deep mud leftover after the Mississippi River reclaimed its flood waters." 
 

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.....

Multitasking to Make the Book Richer

Some of my time as the director of the Bolduc House Museum is spent researching various aspects of life in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, during the late 18th century. Because I decided to set Stuck in the Mud at this museum and in this town, it seems efficient and fun to incorporate what I am researching and discovering now into the story. Hence the 500 year old Native American female corpse that got unearthed in the story. No such thing happened on our site - you would definitely have heard about it in the media if that were to have happened. But I learned of a similar discovery plowed up by accident long ago in a farmer's field across the river nearby as the crow flies and then a colleague explained that some tribes, Chickasaw was one, sometimes buried bodies and skulls in separate graves. Another scholar claimed that this kind of burial indicated that the woman was a slave. So when Aileen, the new fictional museum professional in Stuck in the Mud, is assigned the task of liaison between the museum and the various entities that must respond to the discovery of a corpse buried in the lawn for centuries, she will need to know even more than I have begun to find out. It will add a sub-plot. Equally relevant to the story is an exhibit I have on display right now of ten significant engravings and mezzotints from our collection. Aileen's uncle, John, a professor of art history at Webster University in St. Louis, will be a valuable consultant to the museum in the book. This provides a natural way to link the characters from St. Louis to the ones in Ste. Genevieve and, at the same time, incorporate nerdy information to make the book much richer, I think.

Planning a novel

My dining room wall is beginning to look striped with long adding machine tape strips filled with notes hastily written in black ink. One describes Hans, the pastor-murderer who killed himself before his congregation would learn of his flaws. Another strip profiles Gary, a member of Hans' congregation, an artist doing an MFA degree at the university where Aileen's uncle, John, teaches art history. A third is for Uncle John who was secretly in a relationship with the pastor for many years while serving his church as an elder. Another strip lists the events that are important to relate: a wedding that happened 25 years ago; a funeral; a concert - which of the characters were in attendance and how their paths crossed over time resulting in the discovery and investigation of three dead bodies. More strips to come are for Lillian, Mat, and Aileen herself - I thought I had the book planned until I started writing and discovered that this is a very different process than Pastor's Ex-Wife. That first novel is organized more like a bead necklace is made - each bead is complete in itself and the string binds them to each other. Stuck in the Mud depends more on the careful interplay of people over time so I have to really concentrate on the back stories and motivations. I did decide that Gary will be the sort of person who doesn't get anyone's joke at the same time that he becomes the brunt of many people's jokes even when he is sitting on the same couch at a party. His character will provide some measure of comic relief I think.

What's the Big Idea?

Pastor's Ex-Wife has several big ideas winding through each chapter. One of them is the diversity of contemporary American Protestantism as it is expressed by congregations on Sunday mornings in church. In fact one of the earliest concepts that emerged as I was writing the novel was the character who is an anonymous church critic - modeled after restaurant reviews written by diner/journalists who pretended to be regular guests. An anonymous church critic who wrote up reviews for the religion section of a newspaper who would serve to preview what a particular church had to offer a visitor because (and you do not know this unless you have been shopping for a new church "home") it can be extremely uncomfortable to visit a church for the first time. Pastor's Ex-Wife really is a romp through contemporary American Protestantism which is a large umbrella over these and likely many more types of churches.

• Liturgical Churches like Episcopal, Lutheran, Orthodox, and Anglican are examples of denominations in which the services follow a written format that is nearly identical from week to week and the year is organized by a series of liturgical "seasons" - Lent is the season as I write this. These churches tend to offer communion weekly and involve a wide spectrum of liberal and conservative members. Visitors can be intimidated because the congregation responds to the routine of standing, responsive reading/singing, kneeling, sitting without needing to use the book and the newcomer feels that everyone is aware of his awkward attempt to blend in
• Liberal Churches like some Presbyterian, Methodist, and Church of Christ, etc. are examples of denominations in which hymns are usually sung, sometimes contemporary Christian songs are added. There tends to be three songs, special music, an offering, a children's sermon, and a sermon directed to the adults which connects some biblical passage to a social or ethical challenge or world event.
• Evangelical Churches like most Baptist, Nazarene,some Presbyterian, and Churches of God etc are examples of denominations where the members must prove that they have personally experienced salvation and that they adhere to a specific theology and life style before they can officially join. Their services tend to be very similar to the one I described for the liberal churches but the sermon directed to the adults typically interprets a biblical passage's requirement on the believer and is often followed by an altar call that invites people to pray at the front of the church as a sign that the sermon persuaded them to some change. Billy Graham is an example of an evangelical preacher. 
• Pentecostal, Charismatic, Assembly of God, and Church of God in Christ are examples of denominations which share the evangelical view that the Bible is inerrant and to be rigorously followed by the believers today. In addition these churches practice the "Baptism of the Holy Spirit", the "gifts of the Spirit", and "speaking in tongues." They tend to have longer services with extended times of singing and physically demonstrative worship  during which members of the congregation may interrupt the planned agenda with prophetic messages, prayers, or personal "testimonies" as they are prompted by God. 

There are many more variations on the same basic four types of Protestant church. In my opinion God is present in some measure at every service that convenes in the name of Jesus Christ the risen son of God.

Pastor's Ex-Wife dedicates each chapter to portray a different church where Terry Soldan and her friend William go as first time visitors. Terry takes notes and then writes the experience in her column at the newspaper where she works as the religion editor.

Pastor's Ex-Wife inserts an extra twist - by disguising themselves as people of color Terry and William investigate what Barack Obama (and he is far from the originator of this comment) claims to be "the most segregated hour in America".

I think the book makes good use of humor in the telling....

Stuck in the Mud relies on the juxtaposition of faith and abusive Christians in positions of authority which is similar to Pastor's Ex-Wife but one of the big ideas in Stuck in the Mud is gender in mid-America. I started hanging my story-wall graphic organizer for Stuck in the Mud today.

Laying out a story's bones

I have been thinking a lot about my writing process lately. My conclusion - at least for now- is that mine is not easily described. It matches how I approach any large creative project. As soon as I can envision the finished product it is easy to define the detailed steps that it will take to arrive at the goal. The other imperative for me is to conceptualize it graphically or physically but always visually. It doesn't matter what the genre is either.

I wrote lots of serious papers in college and graduate school. Before computers or word processors when only the elite among us owned electric typewriters, I typically wrote quotes from research documents longhand on single index cards with the citation information on the back of the same card. Then I assigned a category to the quote, arranged the categories by sequencing the cards in a logical order. I didn't usually bother writing a formal outline. Instead I hand-wrote text to connect the quotes on pieces of paper to which I taped the cards where they went in the narrative. To rearrange the paper I did not rewrite sections; I used scissors to cut the document and taped it back together.

The place that best worked to do this was the Asian studies library at Washington University. It had very large tables and very few students ever used it. So I could spread out. Sometimes my paper looked like a badly designed very long kite damaged after too many collisions with trees. When I was happy with the end product I typed it in triplicate with the requisite carbon paper between the copies. It was a messy task that inevitably also required the use of those little white correction strips - also in triplicate - and don't even remind me of the agony of spacing footnotes so they displayed properly at the bottom of the same page that contained the information discussed or cited below.

The other day my office manager watched me organizing a complex set of project tasks for an important staff meeting at the museum. She described me as a visual thinker. I never would have said the same about myself but in retrospect upon reflection I think she is correct and therein lies the key to what is slowing down my progress with Stuck in the Mud. I lack both the place and the mechanism to lay out the story's bones - the cut out pages to tape back together before writing the actual story.

When I wrote Pastor's Ex-Wife the structure was clear from the start. The first and last chapters function as bookends. In the first chapter, Terry Soldan found the courage to revisit her ex-husband, Pastor Ed's church - incognito in the guise of an African American woman but really in her role as the anonymous church critic for a newspaper. The first chapter describes the service from her perspective. The last chapter is the text of the article she wrote about Abundant Love Church for the newspaper the following week. In between the first and last chapter is the chronological story of how she decided to leave Pastor Ed and how she gained the self-confidence and courage to go back (to the church for one Sunday service - not to the abusive marriage or the twisted braid of lies that had kept her trapped there for 24 years previously.)

Each chapter advances Terry's story, relies on a specific metaphor, profiles a church, a pastor, a Sunday service, and a congregation. Each chapter also contains an anecdote inspired by my work as a music teacher in an urban inner city public school system. So as soon as I decided on the particulars for a chapter I was ready to write it. I even created a chapter planning sheet for the book.

Stuck in the Mud does not rely on such symbolism. It is a murder mystery with three corpses to deal with. I have some serious themes to weave through the story and I know my cast of characters and the settings very well. I think I will get a few rolls of adding machine tape tomorrow. Then I'll visually arrange the story as it will be experienced by each character. Next I'll cut it up and rearrange it on a wall.

That should help a lot.

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.

Shall I tell you......

A few days before my birthday I received at phone call at work from my childhood friend, William. He is one third of the inspiration for William in The Pastor's Ex-Wife - the bachelor retiring elementary school principal to whom Terry Soldan flees for refuge from her abusive husband and soon to be ex, Pastor Ed. We (the real William and I) chit chatted about our children - mine grown, his entering the teen years, and about friends from grade school. Our conversation refocused me on this blog, on my decision to really work on writing no matter how exhausting it is to lead the transition of a static historic house museum to a vibrant living history excursion that takes our visitors back to experience French colonial America in the mid-Mississippi valley as it was.
I identified my core or long-term aspirations recently. You see, I am also at a transition - the kids are grown and gone. I am being successful at what I do for a regular paycheck and I love my job which I hope to keep for a long time. But what I want as my legacy is to be known as a writer of compelling fiction. That is also my retirement plan so another birthday accentuates the reality that I am fewer than 10 years from retirement age. Ouch.
I have already proven that I can make a living as a freelance writer - I've been paid to write in many different genres, for different audiences and purposes. I write daily as part of my job at the museum too - web content, social media posts, articles, business letters, grant proposals, newsletters, brochures, curriculum, advertising - but my real goal is to build an audience for my fiction- which deals with the juxtaposition of authentic faith in abusive marriages. You already know about Pastor's Ex-Wife. Should I tell you about the other novels that are in various stages of completion?

The Disciplined Writer

I wrote today - a one page promo for the historic sites in Ste. Genevieve for a group of us to pick apart and refine; rewrote parts of the edited draft of the quarterly newsletter for the Museum; wrote a bunch of emails; wrote website content; updated posts via Roost for social media sites; and created additional content in the persona of Zuts the Squirrel a.k.a (per one of my sisters) my alter ego and Museum mascot. Probably I wrote more things than that. It's a usual day so why do I think I haven't made any progress on my goal of becoming known as a writer of significant fiction? Hmmm.....

Selective Memory

I picked up an old book by Hallie and Whit Burnett, Fiction Writer's Handbook, at the library. It starts with a preface by Norman Mailer and it's been a while since I've read a book on the craft. It is very well done - more about the philosophy behind the writing process than most books with similar titles and goals. The authors take a wide view because as the editors of Story Magazine, they had a large and diverse number of examples to choose from.

One statement matches my process in writing Pastor's Ex-Wife well: "We absorb, we sympathize, we reject, we present, it all comes from our own selective memory in the end."

And so it does in my story of how one woman, Terry Soldan, achieved enough personal courage to return to the church pastored by her ex-husband, incognito, in order to shut the door on that abusive season so that she could step into a new place emotionally.

Dead Butterfly Wings

My friend, Lisa and her husband, Gavin, were the first readers of Pastor's Ex-Wife. I emailed them a chapter every few days as soon as the first (but not the roughest first) draft was written. They responded with questions, things I needed to clarify, and they shared the emotions the story provoked in them. It made the writing process more real for me to have an audience whose questions often inspired the next chapter as it unfolded.

Oh, yes, I had an outline - really a plan, not an outline. I work best when I have determined certain requirements for each chapter - it had to move the plot forward, it had to include humor, it had to turn around a single unifying metaphor, it had to employ similes and a full range of sensory details....dialogue... an anecdote from my years teaching in an inner city school district, as well as a church building, a pastor, a congregation, a service and sermon.

I mixed and matched the church features like a crazy quilt - everything is based on reality but abstracted like a cubist painting to create a new fictional construct of a church that worked with the story.

I did not realize how important Lisa and Gavin had been to the writing process until last night.

I am working on a new novel (working title "Dead Butterfly Wings"). It is set in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, and is a murder mystery which also treats the theme I dedicate my adult fiction to explore: authentic faith within abusive families.

Lisa and Gavin were my first audience for this first novel - Pastor's Ex-Wife. Lisa shared the background of the protagonist and pastor's ex-wife, Terry Soldan, so her emotional reactions predicted to me whether the story felt real, authentic, plausible....

Until yesterday, I did not have an audience in mind for "Dead Butterfly Wings." Now I do - a person to whom the book just may be dedicated. It won't be the same. I won't be showing him the chapters as they get written but I am writing as if I were telling him the story as it unfolds on the page. I don't even know whether he will ever read it. But, I learned a tremendous thing about how I write just by realizing that I am writing FOR someone specific. It motivates me to put my heart on the page more fully.

Thank you, Lisa and Gavin.

You can read Pastor's Ex-Wife by Lesley Barker on the Kindle. If you don't own a kindle, you can download the kindle ap for free to your computer desktop or smart phone and then you can buy the book in the Amazon Kindle Store here.