You Talking to Me? by Guest Author Camille Minichino

Please welcome today's guest, author and good buddy Camille Minichino, she of many authorial pen names, including her latest, Elizabeth Logan. Her (that is, Elizabeth's) newest book is FISHING FOR TROUBLE in her Alaskan Diner Series. For more about Camille and her work, check out her website at http://www.minichino.com/.

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One great thing about Ann Parker's Silver Rush blog is that even a part of speech is acceptable for a topic. Guests like me don't have to come up with a thesis sentence or ten pages on Compare and Contrast, as if we were back in English 101.

We don't even have to stick to mysteries, which gives me permission to talk about a work of nonfiction: "The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words say About Us," by J. Pennebaker, a social psychologist and language expert.

 Doesn't that sound worthy of a blog hosted by an author who slings words around magically, transporting us flawlessly to another century?

I was especially interested in Pennebaker's chapter on how men and women "speak" in books and movies. Which writers have both men and women sounding like men? (Shakespeare and Quentin Tarantino, it turns out.) Both men and women sounding like women? (Gertrude Stein and Woody Allen.) Men sounding like men and women sounding like women? (Sam Shepard and Thornton Wilder.)

Now I need to know where my books fit. Do my female characters use more personal pronouns, as suggested by Pennebaker's research? Do my male characters shy away from social words, in favor of action words?

My research for dialogue doesn't involve computers as Pennebaker's, but I do try to pay careful attention to the patterns of men and women of all ages and walks of life—the ones who populate my life, anyway. I query a friend's 35-year-old son ("Do you call everyone 'Dude' even when I'm not around?"); my 50- to 60-year-old friends ("How much Net Lingo do you use in everyday life?"); and my 9-year-old grandniece ("What do you say when you think something is pretty? ugly? tastes bad?")

I'm luckier than Ann Parker, of course, since she can't eavesdrop or quiz folks like Inez Stannert and her crew. But maybe she's the lucky one—the language of 1880 is not going to change. It is what it was, to twist a popular phrase, whereas my techie buddies might come up with a new word or phrase before I finish my query.

Consider Net Lingo, characterized by abbreviations and acronyms, such as LOL and BTW and IDK; letter/number homophones—gr8 and b4; nonstandard spelling, like luv and cuz. I fully expect one of my younger relatives to LOL when I use ROTFL past its prime.

Wonder if the use of the subject pronoun will go the way of romance languages, thus disrupting Pennebaker's thesis. I often sign off an email, "Hope all is well." In Italian, "I hope" is simply "Spero." No one uses the "io" for "I."

Like most readers and writers, I enjoy the endless discussions of words, their origins, their evolution, and their telltale patterns.

I wonder if writers of an earlier day fooled anyone by using initials only, or pen names of the opposite gender? Or were readers counting the number of personal pronouns in George Eliot and saying, "Aha! Too many I's and we's. I'll bet this is really a woman."

Camille's second Alaskan Diner mystery FISHING FOR TROUBLE is now available!
Read more about it and find "buy" links here.

Plotting or Pantsing? Or both? by Guest Author Michael Stanley (aka Michael Sears and Stan Trollip)

Michael Sears

Stanley Trollip

Please welcome authors Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip, who write under the name Michael Stanley. Their award-winning mystery series, featuring Detective Kubu, is set in Botswana, a fascinating country with magnificent conservation areas and varied peoples. The latest book in the series is a prequel, titled Facets of Death. It starts the first day Kubu joins the Botswana CID, and he’s immediately thrown into solving a violent heist of rough diamonds from Jwaneng—the world’s richest diamond mine. Their latest thriller Shoot the Bastards introduces Minnesotan environmental journalist Crystal Nguyen. Set mainly in South Africa, it has as backstory the vicious trade in rhino horn.

Michael has lived in South Africa, Kenya, Australia, and the US. He now lives in Knysna on the Cape south coast of South Africa. Stanley splits his time between Minneapolis and Cape Town. For more information, check out their website or their Amazon author page. You can also find them on Facebook, Twitter, and at the blog Murder Is Everywhere.
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When we started our first book, A Carrion Death, we didn’t have much idea about how to write a mystery. We’d written lots of non-fiction, but we’d never tried our hands at fiction. What we had was a premise. The premise had come to us in Botswana’s Chobe National Park after watching hyenas devour a young wildebeest. They ate everything except the horns and hooves. We speculated on what they would do to a human corpse. Nothing would be left. Nothing at all. What a wonderful way of getting rid of a body, we thought! Especially if you had a particular reason that the body should not under any circumstances be recognized.

Michael wrote the first chapter and sent it to Stanley. He was as intrigued and puzzled about the half eaten corpse found in the desert as were the ranger and scientist who found it. What happens next? he asked. Michael didn’t have the faintest idea...

What happens next??

When Detective Kubu went out to the area to investigate, we still didn’t know. We had lots of ideas, but we were coming to grips with all the issues around writing fiction. We’d been told to write about what we knew, so our plan was to have the scientist as hero. But Kubu ignored us and took over, shouldered the academic out of the limelight, and started investigating. He made one discovery after another, leaving a trail of dead plots in his wake.

We can’t imagine a more seat-of-the-pants (pantsing) approach than this. Kubu pulled us up by his bootstraps. Or is that our bootstraps? It was great fun! Maybe there was a freshness and excitement that came from the plot twisting and turning around us as it coalesced. It was also scary, but we weren’t working to a deadline. In the end, after three years, we were left with a plot that we were comfortable with, but also with a strong feeling that this was a very inefficient way to write a book.

When we started the second book, we were convinced that all this chaos was a spinoff of the fact that we knew nothing about writing fiction. It was only much later that we discovered that many

Mind maps!

mystery writers do it that way—pantsing to enjoy the discovery of what’s going on as much as the reader. By the second book, we thought we were experts. We knew better. We spent a lot of time plotting and arguing, rejecting ideas, following twists, taking turns. We had mind maps that couldn’t fit on the dining room table. And eventually we had a plot that we felt held up and that would lead to none of the dead ends that had cost us tens of thousands of discarded words in the first book. We sent our publisher an outline of The Second Death of Goodluck Tinubu and while a few extra embellishments occurred during writing as the characters developed and insisted on doing things their way, the final manuscript followed it pretty closely. We felt that now we understood how to write mystery novels. This, we decided, must be how all the professionals do it!

Our third book was a compromise between the two approaches. The first book was chaos, enjoyable chaos, and ultimately successful chaos—a true example of writing by the seat of your pants. Our second was planned and manicured. Successful too, we believe. An example of plotting and careful execution. Our third was somewhere in between. Our careful plot didn’t work, and we had to pants it out in the end.

Since then, we’ve become committed pantsers.

One result of this rather unstructured writing style, and the fact that Kubu took over as our protagonist without asking us, is that Kubu was quite unplanned. As we went along, we learned more about him, his school, his parents and his wife, but we had no idea how he’d developed into the Criminal Investigation Department’s star detective. Did he make mistakes? How did he learn? We felt that we needed to know the answers, so we decided to write a prequel that starts on the day Kubu joins the police as a new detective in 1998 (Facets of Death).

We also had the idea of a huge diamond heist from the Jwaneng mine in Botswana—the world’s richest diamond mine. If that had happened at the height of the diamond boom, could it have led to a collapse in the Botswana economy? That was a premise we could explore in a pantsing style. We started with the heist and let it play out, feeling the familiar panic when we neared the end of the book and realized that we had no way of catching the kingpin behind the crime.

The book had a plotting aspect as well, forced on us by it being a prequel. We wanted to explore Kubu as a young detective, but we knew where he would end up. He had to become a successful detective. He had to find his wife. His boss had to become director of the Criminal Investigation Department. In short, he had to develop into the present-day character our readers know and enjoy.

What we’ve learned over eight books is that there is no right or wrong way to develop a story. The majority of mystery writers seem to be pantsers, but there are plenty of big names who are plotters. For example, Jeffrey Deaver writes an extensive outline of each book, and then fleshes it out over a few months to get the complete novel.

Writing is a very personal process. Probably each writer (or writing team) has to find the style that works best for them. And it may change from book to book… 

I write like...

I read about the "I write like" site on author Mark Coggins' blog site—Riordan's Desk, and just had to try it for my own books.

First up, the opening two pages from Silver Lies:

I write like
Mary Shelley

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Well, that's interesting. How about the opening to Iron Ties?

I write like
Vladimir Nabokov

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Really?
Okay, let's try Leaden Skies:

I write like
Vladimir Nabokov

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Nobokov gain??
That's pretty strange. The only thing I've read by Nabokov is Lolita, a novel that made/makes me wince. However, Wikipedia says that Lolita "exhibit(s) the love of intricate word play and synesthetic detail that characterised all his works." I like word play, definitely, and synesthetic detail gets a thumbs up from me.

Time for an experiment.

For the first evaluation of Silver Lies (above), I'd put in just a portion of the prologue. Let's try the whole prologue (luckily, I have all the beginnings for all of my books available to read on my website. Makes copy/paste easy). To my surprise, adding those extra pages nixes Mary Shelley and instead...

I write like
James Joyce

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Now that's a bit daunting.
I surely hope they mean James Joyce as in The Dubliners, and not James Joyce as in Ulysses (a book one needs a map, a trail of string, and a course in Joyce to figure out).

Okay. I have Book Four underway. Gotta check that out.
(I'm almost afraid to do this.)
Let's try the first chapter. (Please, oh please, not some incredibly hard-to-read author of the distant past...)

I write like
Kurt Vonnegut

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Hmmmm. My experience with Silver Lies makes me leery of this pronouncement, based as it is on just a few pages.
I decide to plug in the first three chapters, and see what happens.

I write like
Kurt Vonnegut

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I guess that means my writing is consistent for Book #4, at least throughout the beginning. I like Vonnegut... or did, when I read him (a long time ago now). Wikipedia describes his "voice" as "characterized by wild leaps of imagination and a deep cynicism, tempered by humanism." I'm not sure why Book #4 brings up Vonnegut instead of Mary Shelley/James Joyce/Vladimir Nabokov. But the words flow and the book takes shape, almost apart from me. Or as Vonnegut said: "So it goes."

Another favorite Colorado publication . . .

. . . Having featured the Leadville Herald Democrat newspaper yesterday, I thought I'd mention another regional publication I enjoy and subscribe to: Colorado Central. Published monthly by Martha and Ed Quillen of Salida, Colorado Central always delivers. At least, for this "flat-lander" (because that is what I am, living, as I do, a whole whopping 480 feet above sea level).

Besides allowing me to keep up-to-date on what's what and who's who in the Central Colorado region (which includes Leadville, Salida, and a whole lot more), Colorado Central is one of those lovely publications where one is rewarded for reading the small print. For instance, in the Credits section of the December 2008 issue, "Other" reads:

Proofreading by Matt Gonzales and Sally Gonzales. Everything else is the fault of Martha and Ed Quillen, though mostly Ed because he was on the road a lot, and suffered much distraction from various political campaigns.

The masthead on the cover also features different tag lines for every issue that bear careful scrutiny:

(For December 2008) The Monthly Magazine for People who wish the days were a bit longer.
(For August 2008) The Monthly Magazine for People who wonder how summer could pass so quickly.

In the table of contents, the one-sentence descriptions of the articles and regular departments often display the same sense of . . . dare I say, playfulness? For example, from the December 2008 issue:

• The non-lure of the wild
  It's hard to understand how modern kids could resist playing outdoors, but they do.
  

• Keeping Track
  An election prediction gone awry, mining and renewable energy, windmills and zoning, cartoons, and news and comment from all around.
  

• Agenda
  We wonder if anyone reads this line. [! I do! I do!]
  

• After all these years
  The redemptive power of higher forms of craziness.
  

• Water Update
  Keeping up with what's wet.
  

The magazine's website has an archive where you can sample past issues. (Sliding in a little under-the-radar BSP: If you'd like to see what Ed thought of Iron Ties, the second in my mystery series, see the August 2006 issue.) I suggest you go check out Colorado Central. Publications like these are rare, and better than gold. Or should I say, silver?