By Laura Oles

What’s the answer?

While attending a recent Writer’s League of Texas course, Karleen Koen, the talented historical novelist and our instructor, asked a question so simple yet so important, it changed my approach to writing.

“What is the one thing you wish you had known earlier about writing?”

After sitting silently with the question for a few minutes, the answer came to me, and its appearance brought with it contrasting pangs of relief and sadness.

“I wish I had understood earlier the importance of touching my project every day.”

Like many working on a novel (or two), I have several legitimate reasons for not connecting with my work each day. We’re all juggling jobs, kids (who play a maddening number of sports!), community activities and the daily grind of household chores. We have a hundred reasons why we can’t get to our novel in progress, and these are darn good reasons, too.

But…

These excuses offer little comfort when we realize our page count remains in the same stuck location each week. I know– I’ve been there–carrying the disappointment of wanting to create and yet unable to figure out how to fit it into my daily routine. I struggle with this issue and I’m a working writer in the photographic industry, so I do write each day.

I write a lot.

But not fiction.

And therein lies the problem.

I would lump my writing time into the same space, not realizing that fiction writing and nonfiction writing each needed to have a distinct time slot, a specific area in my mind and in my day. My client work always takes priority, because it has to, but I would then fail to figure out how to protect a separate space for fiction.

Jerry Seinfeld, when asked in an interview about he managed to write so much material in a short period of time, stated that it’s not how much you write but how often. I think this advice stretches across all forms of writing. It’s better to touch your project for fifteen minutes than not at all because each tiny effort creates a modicum of momentum, and momentum is a powerful force in getting to THE END.

I can’t profess my mastery of this skill because, although I’ve been far better at fitting in fiction, I still have off days (sometimes several in a row) and it takes me longer to find that groove. Once I find it, I am more resolved to keep going. And then real life intervenes once again.

For me, smaller steps are best. When I have ideas of cranking out 2,000 words in a stretch, I set myself up for failure. Some random event will conspire to cut into my writing time so that finishing 500 words feels like a failure. My goal for the remainder of the year is to be small but consistent in my efforts, and I mark an X on my calendar for each day that I’ve worked on my fiction. Seeing those Xs add up is a cheap trick to help me keep that momentum. I’ll take whatever I can get during those days when kids are going all directions and work is piling up. I remind myself that small steps matter, they all add up to a finished draft. I know because I’ve done it.

What about you? How do you make time to write when daily life seems destined to keep you from creating?

By Elizabeth Buhmann, author of Lay Death at Her Door (Red Adept Publishing, 2013)

Writing is a solitary occupation—up to a point. We confront the blank page alone, wresting plot from story idea, populating plot with characters, and putting words in their mouths. But you can’t get from first draft to final draft without feedback from readers.

In his popular book On Writing, Stephen King says, “You take your story through at least two drafts: the one you do with the study door closed and the one you do with it open.”

King’s advice is to finish writing down the whole story—and to let it sit for a while and then revise—before showing it to anyone. I know writers who do very well letting readers’ comments guide them early and often during the creative process, but for me, King’s way is what works best.

For me, it’s a matter of not allowing other people’s input to knock me off-course. With early feedback, I am likely to lose access to what’s coming from within. If the story is still fragile in my mind, showing it around can be like letting someone sit in a chair I’ve just assembled before the glue has dried. The chair gets busted, the reader lands on the floor, and I am left with a pile of broken sticks!

Readers’ reactions are hard to predict. My first novel was pretty smooth, I thought, by the time I took it to a manuscript class. I was completely taken by surprise when no one understood my main character’s reactions to the events at the beginning of the story.

In chapter one, she learns that a man convicted on her testimony has been exonerated. Yet she shows no surprise, no fear, no consternation. She just sort of hunkers down. My first readers said, “She can’t do that! Why isn’t she angry, why isn’t she stunned? Why isn’t she afraid?”

It made sense to me. MY MC didn’t act surprised because she knew all along that the man was innocent. I was keeping that up my sleeve! I wanted it to come as a surprise a little later in the book. I thought readers might wonder why she was acting the way she was. I thought they might have suspicions, or even guess what was going on.

I was wrong.  Instead of questioning their assumptions, my readers lost confidence that I was telling the story right. I knew how my character had to act, but my readers couldn’t accept what I was telling them. What a disaster!

Finding a big weakness in a story (especially in chapter one!) can be discouraging at first. But it often leads to much greater strength. This was how it worked for me (to my immense relief, after I got over my initial panic).

Oddly enough, I didn’t even understand what my story’s real hook was until one of my critique partners–Brenda Vicars Hummel, whose wonderful YA comes out later this year!–pointed it out to me. My hook was that my main character had lied. Her reactions in chapter one made perfect sense once I let the reader in on her secret.

And once the readers knew she lied, many of them were very curious about why she would have done such a thing. To quote one five-star review: “This mystery grabbed me from the two-word second paragraph. `I lied’…the lie is the elephant in the room…I want to know why she lied! Why, why, why?!”

I still had a good surprise up my sleeve for the ending, but I might never have gotten my readers past the first chapter without what I learned from readers when I opened the study door.

By Elizabeth Buhmann

I love a really good mystery. There is nothing I would rather read.

What I like is the discovery of a hidden reality—dark and terrible—that underlies appearance. And there is satisfaction in seeing evildoers dragged out in the open and brought to justice.

When you write a mystery novel, you invent not one but two stories. One is the hidden story of a crime. The other is a story of discovery.

You start with the hidden drama. Why might one person kill another? How exactly does it go down? How does the murderer conceal the crime?

A man might be jealous of his lover. He quarrels with her, strangles her, conceals the body, and invents an alibi. That’s what happens, but it’s hidden. Nobody knows about it.

The underlying story could be a novel in itself, but it wouldn’t be a mystery—it would be a crime drama, or a tragedy, perhaps. The mystery is about how the hidden story comes to be exposed.

The plot of the mystery begins with the first public sign of a violent reality that hides beneath the placid surface. Shots are heard, or someone disappears. A body might be found.

The first inkling of the hidden story typically leads to a detective being hired or police being called to a crime scene. The detective/protagonist then makes deductions and discoveries that lead inexorably from the first sign of violence to a full exposure of the hidden drama. Only then can justice be restored.

Somebody once asked me why I write stand-alone mysteries instead of detective stories, which can be developed into a series. It’s because the hidden drama is what intrigues me most–the dark and terrible evil underneath the surface.

Lay Death at Her Door is set in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

My first book, Lay Death at Her Door, is not a detective story, but it still has the heart of a mystery, because it’s all about the laying bare of a hidden life. My main character Kate got herself into a situation which led to a man getting shot and Kate being beaten and raped. To protect herself, Kate lied on the stand, and an innocent man went to prison.

So in my book, an eruption of violence was initially explained away by a false solution. The wrong man took the blame. The first inkling of what really happened comes twenty years after the fact (in chapter one), when the innocent man is exonerated by new evidence.

In another departure from the usual structure of a mystery novel, I chose a main character in the hidden drama as my protagonist, rather than the detective who solves the crime. I wanted to tell the story from the inside, even though it meant my main character would be a dark one, morally complicit, however unwillingly, in the real killer’s crimes.

Mysteries are ultimately about justice. In Kate’s story, there was a very real possibility that the truth would never be revealed. What breaks the case is Kate herself. Her own character is her downfall. This to me is a compelling idea—that evil deeds destroy us from within.