Writing Efficiency in Its Myriad Forms

by Brian Thornton

In his excellent piece This Year You Write Your Novel, Walter Moseley gives the following advice: “The first thing you have to know about writing is that it is something you must do every day–every morning or every night, whatever time it is that you have. Ideally, the time you decide on is also the time when you do your best work.”

In his defense, Walter apparently has the luxury to plan out his schedule to quite a specific degree.

Along with “Write every day,” “Write fast” seems to be the mantra of this generation. “Writing fast and producing copious amounts of word product is the key to success,” so many “how to” books seem to say.

Bosh.

I’ll tell ya, I have had my share of 2,000 word-count days. Not a one of them came independent of either a hell of a lot of time spent thinking about what I wanted to write that day, or by a whole lot of later tweaking, editing, or outright re-writing.

Put simply, I can write fast, or I can write well. I cannot do both.

This is not to say that such a thing isn’t possible. It is! Just not for me.

I once wrote a pair of 40,000 word books (80,000 words total) in eight weeks. Tight deadline. Unreasonable (and unprofessional, and unhelpful) development editor didn’t make it any easier.

I was an unmarried, kidless apartment dweller at the time. I had (and still have) a day gig that required a fair amount of headspace. So it was work, home to write, bed, rinse and repeat.

Talk about a miserable couple of months!

Astonishingly these two books are still in print.

We spent longer on reworking what I’d written into something passable than it took to write the initial drafts, or, for that matter, for me to have written them well in the first place. But that was a different time in my career, and in my life.

If I were to find myself in that sort of situation today, I’d have to give the advance back. Seriously. I’ve got a marriage and a house and a wonderful one year-old son, all of whom require my time and attention.

More to the point, they command my time and attention. I enjoy the hell out of being married, being a father, and owning a home. I suspect the fact that I was in my mid-forties by the time I experienced any of these pleasures does nothing to lessen them.

Couple these aspects of my daily life with the fact that my day gig still requires a lot of my energy and attention, and I find myself left with the question, “How do I get anything written at all, let alone sold?”

The answer is that for I published my most recent book in 2011. That was also the year in which I collected and edited an anthology of crime fiction called West Coast Crime Wave. I got married and bought my house in 2010. My son was born in 2012.

So there was some adjustment involved in taking on these new responsibilities, adjustment time during which my publishing slowed to a stand-still.

This is not to say that I stopped writing during this time. Far from it. I figure that during the second half of 2011 and all of 2012, I easily wrote 50,000 words on my work-in-progress historical mystery.

I just won’t be publishing any of those words. They were intended to keep my hand in it, if you will, not to be part of the final equation.

And it worked.

You heard it here first: I’m just wrapping the sale of my first short story in years. I’m also nearly 2/3 of the way through the final draft of my current WIP, a historical thriller set in antebellum Washington, D.C. By this time next year, I’ll have this and another novel wrapped, in addition to writing three more new short stories, and publishing them along with some of my previously published canon in a collection.

And I won’t do it be “writing every day” or “writing fast.” With my schedule that’s just not feasible. So I do the next best thing.

I write when I can where I can as much as I can and as often as I can. Sometimes it’s 2,000 words a day. Sometimes it’s 2,000 words a week.

It takes a while longer to get my head back into the story once I’ve been away from it for a while, but I think that’s a small price to pay for making time to play with my son every day, spend quality time with my wife, and keep the house from falling down around our ears.

For example, I wrote the ending to “Paper Son,” my short story featured in Akashic Books’ Seattle Noir anthology, while sitting in Seattle Mystery Bookshop, waiting for my friend Simon Wood to finish up a signing there. What’s more, I wrote it on my Blackberry smartphone and emailed it to myself.

I’ve also been known to record story ideas while driving. My commute contributes to some terrific “alone and pondering” time.

Plus, I don’t tend to let story ideas fall by the wayside. This is especially true of short stories. I will get an idea, do some research (remember, I write historical mystery/crime fiction, after all), then begin working on it.

This has stood me in good stead. So far I’ve published five short stories (soon to be six), all with paying venues, out of a total of seven shorts actually completed.

In fact, the second story I sold to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, “Suicide Blonde,” was initially rejected. I reworked it, submitted it to the annual MWA anthology contest. They also rejected it.

But I believed in the story enough to resubmit it to Linda Landrigan AHMM, and this time she bought it. What a great feeling!

By the way, I almost never finish a short by working on it straight through. Usually the ones I’ve published have come from months or years of on and off development. Take the story I am about to sell. I first began work on it in 2007.

I guess in the end I don’t really disagree with Mr. Mosley’s excellent advice, at least in spirit. After all, while I can’t really generate new fiction every single day, I definitely do write every day (in various forms), and I believe I’m in complete agreement with the spirit of his advice, which seems to emphasize the importance of establishing a routine in order to help make you more efficient as a writer.

In that regard, I’m doing the best I can. And life is good!

Some General Thoughts on Character

As I mentioned at the beginning of my previous turn in the Sleuthsayers blog's rotation, I've spent quite a bit of time lately prepping for a class on "character" which I will present as part of this coming Saturday's MWA-University Seattle event (an all-day session of writing craft-related classes presented by writers from all over the country). It ought to be a lot of fun. (If the fun-to-prep-work ratio is even close to one-to-one, it ought to be at least as much fun as the first day of vacation, a Rush concert, and winning the lottery, all rolled up in one!)
So, needless to say, I've been doing a whole lot of thinking about the literary/thematic notion of "character."

Which begs the question: just exactly what the hell is "character"?
 

Henry James around the time he wrote The Art of Fiction.

When faced with life questions such as these, I turn to those giants who have come before. In this case I  started with that sage of writing sages, Henry James, and see what he has to say about what constitutes literary "character" in his classic rumination The Art of Fiction (1884):

"What is character but the determination of incident? And what is incident but the illumination of character?"

Sounds a lot like Aristotle's definition of "plot," that it is "character revealed by action." Which makes sense, James being a product of his times and education. And gentlemen in 19th century America were hardly considered "educated" unless they had made a great study of the likes of Aristotle.

So, yes, helpful, but I was looking for something less esoteric. More concrete. So I went a bit more modern. Next I tapped noted writing teacher Dwight V. Swain, who had this to say in his wonderful book Creating Characters: How to Build Story People (1990):

"The core of character, experience tells me, lies in each individual story person's ability to care about something; to feel, implicitly or explicitly, that something is important."

So Swain has a different take on it: rather than tying the question of what constitutes character to how it is revealed (through action), he posits that a literary character is defined and in ways constituted by what that character cares about, its "passion." Again, helpful, but also a bit out there.

I needed something more....succinct and to the point. So who better to consult on this weighty issue than that most succinct of fiction writers, Ernest Hemingway?

Here's what Hemingway had to say about the question in Death in the Afternoon (1932):

Hemingway around the time he wrote Death in the Afternoon.

"When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. If a writer can make people live there may be no great characters in his book, but it is possible that his book will remain as a whole; as an entity; as a novel."

Wow- kinda long-winded for Ol' Papa, there, huh? And believe it or not, I cut that quote off before it got out of hand. Our man Hemingway waved rhapsodic for several long sentences about why characters should not be "fake," but not really on how to keep them from being so. Since to him the point of fiction was to make it as "real" as possible, he even suggests that perhaps the true test of literary realism in a novel is how dull it is? I got news for Papa's ghost: I've read far too many "realistic" novels in that vein. As much as I love a whole passel of his work, I gotta disagree with him on that note.

Plus, you know, his quote is really not exactly on point.

So where to go next? I figured that if Hemingway couldn't get to the point of what "character" actually is, then perhaps his friend, rival and in many ways literary opposite, F. Scott Fitzgerald, might be able to do the trick. I love Fitzgerald's writing. Elegaic, expansive, deeply personal– perhaps he would give me a comprehensive view of what exactly literary character is?

This I got from Fitzgerald's notes for his final novel, the unfinished masterpiece, The Last Tycoon:

Fitzgerald around the time he began The Last Tycoon.

"Action is character."

That's it.

Huh.

Who knew there was actually a topic out there on which Fitzgerald was orders of magnitude more succinct than his terse pal and occasional drinking buddy (during their Paris days), Hemingway? But again, not all that helpful, and kind of harkens back to the beginning with Henry James/Aristotle.

And then I found it. And I found it in, of all places, a wonderful blog published by an editor named C.L. Dyck. In an entry over there she sums up the words of such writing sages as Randy Ingermanson, Jeff Gerke and Rennie Browne on exactly this question, and does so quite well:


"Characters feel like real people. with a past, present, and future, uniquely varied in creative ways and revealed–as with real people–through the things they say and do."

Thanks C.L.! Way to put it all together! If you'd like to read her complete blog post on this topic, you can find it here. And in fact I highly recommend checking out any number of other interesting topics in her blog, which can be found cataloged here.

So there you have it, folks. My first step down the road to teaching a class on character: being able to speak intelligently as to what it actually is!

So how about you? What is your succinct working definition of "Character"? Feel to chime in with a response in the comments section below!

An Interview with Hist-Myst Author Ruth Downie

Ruth Downie is the author of five historical mysteries set in ancient Roman-occupied Britain. Her protagonist Gaius Petreius Ruso is a Gaul-born Roman citizen serving in Britain as an army doctor. In the first book he saves the life of a dying slave- a strong-willed Briton named Tilla, who becomes Ruso's "housekeeper," and eventually his wife. Together the pair find themselves plunged into a series of awkward situations (with Tilla usually doing the plunging!) invariably resulting in Ruso's reluctant investigation of some sort of ill-concealed malfeasance.
 

Ruth, thanks very much for taking the time to answer some questions about yourself and your work. First: please tell us a little bit about yourself.

I worked as a secretary/administrator after University, and made a mental escape into creative writing as an adult. This started with short stories, and I was hugely encouraged by being runner-up in a “Start a Novel” competition for a national newspaper (The Daily Mail) and by winning the Fay Weldon section of the BBC’s “End of Story” competition. ‘Medicus’ started as three chapters for another “start a novel” competition run by the Historical Novel Society, (to whom I’m hugely grateful). There are now five novels in the series, and a sixth should be published in the summer of 2014. Who’d have thought it?!

Meanwhile I’m delighted to have returned to live in the West Country after many years’ absence. I have a husband, two grown-up sons and a cat, and am never happier than when on an archaeological dig in the sunshine.

How did you come to being a writer?

My degree was in English literature, but frankly that put me off - when you spend three years reading literary masters, anything you might produce yourself looks feeble in comparison. It was only years later when I had small children at home and was studying for an accountancy exam in the evenings that I decided I needed to loosen my brain up, and tentatively ventured into a Creative Writing class.

So why write historical mystery? And why a character from Britain's distant past? Especially someone so "non-Briton" as Gaius Petreius Ruso?

I never realised how interesting ancient history was until we went on a family visit to Hadrian’s Wall. Rather late, it dawned on me that the past was populated by real people, and that they had been here. When we learned in a museum that, “Roman soldiers were not allowed to marry, but were allowed to have relationships with local women”, I began to wonder what must have happened to those women. So initially I was fascinated by the mystery of all those lost stories: the murders came later.  

As for Ruso: I wanted a foreigner’s take on the Britons, and I liked the tension of that foreigner being part of a long-term occupying force. It was interesting to have Britannia as what we’d now think of as a “developing country” – especially as plenty of the Britons were not at all interested in development, and would rather have been left alone.

The character of Tilla is dynamically drawn, possessed of a unique voice, and plays an important role in each of the books in this series. Did you envision writing something wherein a "female counterpart" would play such a large role when you first started writing about Ruso and his world, or did Tilla "intrude" on your original plans?

Tilla was definitely there from the start: she’s the “local woman” who has a thing or two to teach the know-it-all Romans.

In my limited experience with writing and publishing mystery-themed historical fiction I've found the research itself to be something of a necessary quagmire. On the one hand it's a requirement (albeit an enjoyable one) if you wish to have the ring of authenticity to your work. On the other hand, it's possible to go too far, to place too much emphasis on it, to include so much historical description that it bogs down the narrative. You seem to have a terrific handle on this, including enough historical detail to give your narrative the proper "feel" for the period involved, without overdoing it. How do you tackle the question of research: how much to do, how much to include? And do you continue to research once you've begun your actual drafting of the novel?

To be honest I’ve never really got the research under control. I’d happily read books, wander round

sites and museums, and trawl around the Internet all day every day. (Who wouldn’t?) I’ve also done a lot of archaeological digging on a Roman villa site and a certain amount of hanging around re-enactors and wearing mock Roman clothes, which is great for getting the ‘feel’ of the past.  It’s quite a struggle to set all this aside and get on with putting the words in order, and I’m very easily distracted back into research if something crops up that I’m not sure about.

As a reader, however, I’m very impatient. I want to know what happens next. I’m not interested in struggling through the undigested fruits of the author’s research - although if I ever find a way to fit a clue into the patterns on Romano-British box flue tiles, they’ll turn up somewhere in a plot.  I’m aware of the advice that everything should be relevant to the story, although I fear I don’t always abide by it.  Sometimes I can’t resist slipping in an entertaining fact. SEMPER FIDELIS has the “epispasm,” the procedure on offer in the ancient world for any gentleman brave enough to want to disguise his circumcision. I suspect that my subconscious may have arranged part of the plot specially to get that in…

In your nonfiction asides outside the narrative of you novels you do a nice job of breaking down what stems from fact and what is pure invention within your work. Do you find fans appreciative of that?

I’m glad you asked that! I’ve often wondered whether it was a good idea or not, because people seldom comment on it. However - I’m writing this from Crimefest, (http://www.crimefest.com) so yesterday I took advantage of being on a discussion panel to ask the audience what they thought. It turns out that most people think it’s a good idea. Several said they glance through the notes before they read a book, which I confess I do, too. And as my fellow-panellist Jane Finnis (http://www.janefinnis.com) pointed out, ‘nobody has to read it if they don’t want to.’

Speaking of "fans," every writer of historical fiction who stays in the game long enough eventually has at least one encounter with someone who approaches them either in person or via email, etc., and insists they got this or that historical detail "wrong." Do you find this a challenge? How do you address this sort of thing?

I’m not a historian, but mercifully this doesn’t happen as often as it did in my nightmares after I found out the first novel was going to be published. I’m fine with it if people contact me personally – sometimes it gives me a chance to explain. (I really MUST check future US editions to make sure the word ‘corn’ is translated into ‘wheat’ because it’s very distracting for the discerning American reader to find the Romano-Britons apparently growing what we call sweetcorn, or maize.)

At other times, although it’s always a blow to the pride to realise you’ve got something very publicly wrong, it’s useful to know for next time and I’m glad people are interested enough to care. What I do struggle with is the very occasional internet reviewer who complains about an error that isn’t an error at all. I don’t reply to reviews but it does bother me that someone else might read that, assume the critic is correct and be put off trying the book.

Speaking of the writing, can you briefly walk us through your process?

Well I’ll try, but only because it will serve as a warning to others. On a good day I wake up with an idea about something I’ve been wrestling with the day before, and scribble it down in the bedside notebook – I try to write a page or two about something every morning, even if it’s only the weather. Then I type it up later and with luck, I get sufficiently involved in it to lose track of time. On a bad day I footle about checking emails for far too long, waste the most productive part of the day, and end up with nothing except a feeling of guilt.

A good day will see 1000 words added to the count. A nearly-at-the-deadline day might even see 3000 words, but not necessarily the right ones.  I’ve now bought “Freedom” software in an attempt to keep myself away from the Internet. And yes, I do know how feeble that sounds!

The best part of the process is re-writing, when the editor has pointed out what doesn’t work and hopefully what does, and you have a chance to try and fix it.

Setting sure seems to play a vital role in your work. So far in your series you've resisted setting any of your books in the same place twice, featuring locations such as Deva (Chester), Londinium (London), Eburacum (York), and the area north of Hadrian's Wall in lowland Scotland and in southern Gaul (France). Any chance of a return to one or any of these places? Also, any chance that Ruso and Tilla will eventually wind up in Aquae Sulis (Bath), perhaps to take the waters, only to find....?

Book Six, which isn’t due out until August 2014, will be back in the Hadrian’s Wall region, because

historically I’ve reached the years when the wall was built. But instead of Corbridge, we’ll be thirty miles away in the central region, nearer to Vindolanda and up in the hills.

As for Aquae Sulis - Book Two was very nearly set there. I’d bought all the research books and been for the field trip – but told nobody else - when I discovered Kelli Stanley’s website and found that she was about to send her own Roman medic there in her next book. There’s only a limited amount of source material to work with and it would have been silly to try and draw from the same well, so I fear Ruso won’t be taking the waters after all!

Which authors, regardless of genre categorization, do you consider your primary influences as an author? And are there authors whose work you enjoy, but don't consider influences?

That’s tricky, because I suspect in some way we’re influenced by everything we read. (*Note to self: spend less time messing about on the Internet, LOL*) Discovering Lindsey Davis’s Falco novels gave me the confidence to carry on writing Roman-era fiction with modern dialogue and humour – something I wasn’t sure was ‘allowed’ when I started doing it. I love Martin Cruz Smith’s Russian novels, because Renko is such a superb lead character. CJ Sansom’s Shardlake series is a must-read, and anything by Elmore Leonard is an example of how to tell a fine story with a few words.

Thanks so much for taking the time to be interviewed! As a sign-off, please tell us what you're reading right now?

I’ve just finished ‘Pigs in Clover’ by Simon Dawson – the story of a couple who abandoned their jobs in London to live on a smallholding. It’s a very honest, moving and funny account, especially as I’ve both met and eaten some of the livestock Simon mentions.

Next up: Robert Goddard’s “The Ways of the World” – a proof copy for review. I’m looking forward to being taken to Paris in 1919.

 

Historical Mystery Novel Review: THE PARIS DEADLINE by Max Byrd

by Brian Thornton

(Note: I know I promised you a post on some of the howlers out there currently passing as "historically authentic period dialogue" in historical fiction, and that's forthcoming in my next posting it two weeks. Today I want to talk about a terrific book by a first-rate author, because, hey, it's almost June, we're on the cusp of summer, and I'm alllllll about the positives!) 

 I read a lot of books.

Okay, check that. I start a lot of books. Most of them are history or historical mystery, or some other subset of the mystery genre (classic hard-boiled/noir, contemporary noir, police procedural, and so on), and I don't finish nearly as many of them as I start. In today's post I'd like to give a thumbnail sketch of one of the books that I did actually finish.

Because, hey, it really was that good.

Yes, THE Max Byrd!

Let's talk Max Byrd. (He's the guy in the spiffy safari jacket to our right.)

Yes, *that* Max Byrd, an Edgar award-winning author who has written a terrific new novel in what I hope might be a new series. It's called The Paris Deadline.

I cannot urge strongly enough those who love historical mystery for both the history and the mystery to pick up this book and give it a try.

I stumbled across Byrd and his work quite by accident. Late last year I read his review of Alan Furst's latest in the The New York Times and liked the writing in the review so much I took a flyer on Byrd's latest, The Paris Deadline. I was far from disappointed.

The book is set in1927 Paris, its protagonist is Toby Keats, an expatriate American who works the rewrite desk for the International Herald Tribune. Keats is a veteran of the Great War: a sapper assigned to Sir John Norton-Griffiths' famed international "sapper" unit, and spent the war working to keep the Germans from tunneling under the Allied lines (sinking mines, then blowing them up, collapsing trench networks, etc.).

Scarred by his experiences during a particularly traumatic cave-in, Keats avoids tight spaces- won't even use the Metro-and quickly informs the reader he is the "only American in Paris at the time who did not know Ernest Hemingway." He does however know and work with both (future food writer) Waverley Root and a particularly ambitious young would-be war correspondent named William L. Shirer.

We're no more than a few chapters into the book than Keats finds himself caught up in the search for an antique automated duck (designed by the famous 18th century inventor Jacques de Vaucanson) whose inner workings might just hold the key to designing guidance systems for a newfangled invention called a "missile." Not surprisingly, the duck goes missing, and equally not surprisingly, a bunch of Germans are dead set on getting their hands on it. Competing with them for this prize are a haughty Wall Street banker living and working in Paris, a beautiful American girl sent by none other than superinventor Thomas Edison to purchase said duck and take it back to America so Edison can study and replicate it.

People get dead. People get beat up. Keats gets thrown together with the aforementioned beautiful American girl a number of times, all in the quest for this duck. And Byrd, who has several historical novels featuring former American presidents to his credit, makes it all come together and sing like, well, like a wind-up nightingale!

Byrd evokes 1920's Paris so successfully that at times I felt like I was reading an unpublished chapter of Hemingway's A MOVEABLE FEAST (and coming from me, that is praise). The story is engaging, the characters charming. The mystery at the heart of the book compelling (after all, it's about a two century old toy duck, of all things!).

Little wonder Kirkus called The Paris Deadline one of the ten best historical mysteries of 2012.

I give it my highest recommendation, and just hope there are more where this one came from!

Journaling for Your Work in Progress

Riffing on Rob's terrific post from yesterday on how writing about his novel actually helps him stay creative in the writing of his novel. I think anything you can do during the drafting process that will help you keep your characters/settings/situations/plot fresh and mobile in your mind is going to be of assistance in getting to the finish line with your novel.
This is true of other pieces of work as well, short stories, nonfiction, what have you. And for my money the single most effective way to do all of the above is to journal about your work-in-progress.

Plot diagrams are nice. Character sketches are really important. But for me, I need the internal monologue (and yes, sometimes dialogue) that comes from writing about my writing.

Everyone ought to have a writing journal. If you don't, whatever the format, either Word doc or notebook, you're missing out on something that can help keep your chops sharp and your story in your head. I have notebooks full of entries about the books and short stories I've written. They've been fruitful contributors in a multitude of ways, especially when I hit a dry spell and can't seem to keep my plot moving forward, or once it's stalled, get it rolling again.

That's when I go back to the well. And sometimes re-reading what I've written about my various works-in-progress, even if it bears no fruit at the time, comes back to life when I delve into my oeuvre seeking some sort of fresh idea, some spark to get things rolling again.

Take short stories for example.

I've been known to start one, write myself into a corner, and leave it to work on something else for a while. Then there are the ones I've written that went nowhere when I tried to place them for publication.

Those I set aside too; resolving to re-work them later. One of them ("Suicide Blonde") was written specifically for AHMM, so when Linda Landrigan (rightly) passed on it, I set it aside for a while. And when I journaled about my next work-in-progress, I threw in asides about what ideas I had about re-working "Suicide Blonde" to make it a more successful piece. I also solicited feedback from my critique partners and journaled about their input.

Devoting this sort of headspace to the story (and we're only talking about the amount of time it took to write a few lines per night about it) paid off in the long run. I re-worked the story, submitted it for the MWA themed-anthology contest for that year, don't make that cut, then turned around and re-submitted it to AHMM. This time Linda bought it.

As I've mentioned in previous blog entries I am currently hard at work on an historical mystery novel set in mid-1840s Washington DC. I've done two previous drafts (One full and the other a partial re-write) while trying to work out the plot to my satisfaction. After a couple of false starts I really feel like I'm on the road to completing this novel.

So when a friend recently started up a quarterly e-zine (published electronically and available on Kindle, etc., and a paying venue, to boot) and expressly requested a short story from me, I viewed the notion of writing a short story from scratch, research, etc. (remember, I write historicals. They require a ton  of research!), as a potential distraction, and demurred. He asked again, and he's a good guy and one hell of a writer, so it's an honor to be asked.

Plus, I'd reached a slow-down patch in my novel, so I shifted gears and went back to the notebooks, and dug up an idea I'd initially had for a short story featuring Renaissance Italian adventurers attempting to break the ultimate political prisoner out of the Turkish sultan's toughest prison in 1580s Constantinople.

And I began to journal.

I had a couple of false starts to fall back on (I keep all of my "didn't make the cut" drafts, so I can "cannibalize" anything useful in later work. After all, no need to re-thread the needle if you've already done it before!), plus a fair bit of notes from my research (my story idea was based on actual events).

I finished the final draft of that short story last night, putting the final touches to it after receiving feedback on the rough draft I pounded out based on my previous notes/drafts and the  pages I devoted to the journaling process and writing about my writing.

And while it's true that sometimes setting aside a good story until you can get all of its parts working right in your head (and that usually takes time, in this case, years!), I couldn't have pulled together all the complex threads for this story and developed them in 8,000 words had I not written about what I was writing: my process, my ideas for fleshing out the story. What worked, what didn't, and so on.

So there you have it. Want to finish a writing project? Well then get to journaling!

Brian

I owe it all to Rilke

It is my pleasure to introduce our new blogger, Brian Thornton.  As you will learn, he is the author of several books, but I thought of him for this spot mostly because of his short stories, which include two of the best I have read in recent years: "Paper Son" in SEATTLE NOIR, and "Suicide Blonde" in AHMM.  I hope that in months to come he will write about the art of writing historical mysteries, among other topics.  And now, a big SleuthSayers welcome for the man of the hour!
— Robert Lopresti 

by Brian Thornton

First things first, I'd like to thank my new colleagues here among the SleuthSayers for their exceedingly warm welcome. It's nice to be invited to contribute, and an honor to be asked to do so here of all places. So, thanks all!

For my inaugural contribution to this blog I thought I'd talk about the power of networking. Oh sure, it's hardly a revolutionary concept that if you hope to succeed in the Brave New World of 21st century publishing you're shooting yourself in the foot if you don't get out there and meet people, make contacts, get yourself some name recognition, etc.

And over the past few years I have watched a plethora of writers work this angle with the sort of single-mindedness usually reserved for I.R.S. auditors and bomb squad technicians; all with varying degrees of success. First I hear it's about name recognition, then about platforming, then about leveraging your contacts, and then of course, the networking magic bullet du jour seems to be creating something known as a "street team."

But hey, keep checking back. I'm sure it'll be something different, some other angle, some other hook, in a month's time.

Look, I get it. With the current on-going technological revolution, publishing is undergoing a centuries-overdue market correction, and, to steal a line from Daryl Hall talking about the music industry's not dissimilar growing pains of a few years back, "There are no more gatekeepers."

So this begs the question: how do emerging authors shout loud enough to be heard among the myriad other voices in publishing's ever larger, ever louder gymnasium?

I don't have a magic bullet. What I do have is some experience, a track record, and a working theory. And since this blog is all about writing, and the craft, and (at least in part) the whole publishing game, I thought I'd share it with our readers.

So here goes: get out there, go to writing events, whether they be signings, conventions, or workshops. Once there, meet people, and be yourself.

Rinse and repeat as necessary.

That's it.

 Simple, right?

But wait, you say, I live nowhere near the big cities where these sorts of things happen, or I can't afford to go to one of the big conventions, etc., etc., etc., and so on, and so forth.

Point taken.

If you can't get out there literally, then get out there figuratively, using the tool you're currently using to read this post.

After all, that's what I did. And it lead to my first book deal. What's more, I couldn't have done it without the assistance of Rainer Maria Rilke. More on him in a bit.

Here's how it worked:

Just about a decade ago I had finally finished my first novel: an amateur sleuth piece set in a law school in the Pacific Northwest. I was quite excited to have it complete and ready for...what, I had no idea.

A friend of mine who worked in marketing told me that I needed to market my book. "I'm the author," I scoffed. "It's someone else's job to market the book."

I was, of course, incredibly naive.

A bit of research revealed a summer writers' conference, as well as several national writing groups with local presences in my area (I live in Seattle). When I signed up for that first writers' conference I was between jobs, the entrance fee wasn't cheap.

But that's another story, for another post.

Since I had written a mystery novel, I decided to join the Mystery Writers of America. Luckily they held meetings in my area, and I began attending them. I met people and was myself. I made friends. I had a good time. I networked.

One of the best-kept secrets about membership in Mystery Writers of America is its email list, EMWA. In the years since I first joined the organization EMWA has been somewhat eclipsed as a networking tool by Facebook and other forms of social media, but for me it proved invaluable.

About a year after I joined MWA, I saw a post on EMWA by someone who, in the course of responding to someone else's email to the list, remarked how much she loved the work of a German poet you likely never heard of, named Rainer Maria Rilke.

This guy:

 Interestingly enough, I also happen to be a fan of the work of Rainer Maria Rilke (In translation, I don't speak or read German). So I did what you do when you meet someone who shares an uncommon interest with you.

I struck up a conversation, and made a friend.

This new friend turned out to be an acquisitions editor for an east coast press. She's still a friend (flew out from Boston a couple of years ago to attend my wedding), and she was the person who offered me my first book deal. And my next, and then introduced me to other editors at her press, who in turn offered me still more work.

It was all nonfiction, and at first it was work for hire. But it paid pretty well (better than most mid-listers bring in these days), and most of the work was writing about things that interested me. Eventually I even worked out royalty-based deals for original ideas of my own.

 As a direct result of that first friendship I am now the author or co-author of seven books, the ghostwriter of another one, and collection editor for two vastly different anthologies.And that first editor friend? She's now my agent.

I guess what I'm saying is that time spent searching for a "magic bullet" to get you published is time wasted. I made that friendship hoping to compare notes with someone else who enjoyed "Autumn Day" and the Orpheus sonnets, not angling to meet someone who could do something for me.

So the moral of the story: get yourself out there and let those connections happen. You never know where they'll take you!