What We're Writing Week: Julia's Tied Up In Knots

 JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I had really hoped I'd be posting a video of the Hallelujah Chorus and  telling you all AT MIDNIGHT COMES THE CRY is done, but I've hit two, shall we say, bumps in the road.

The first is: the whole action-packed, (hopefully) thrilling finale, gathering together the entire group of good guys versus the baddies, take place in a very real location in upstate NY.  A place I last visited about a decade ago - and I wasn't thinking of setting the most important part of a novel there. 

Now, I've written about places I haven't been to before, or about places I haven't been for a while. Or I've made up locations based on the same.  But there's a difference when you're using a location for a setting, aka background, and when you're using it to choreograph an action scene. (More than one scene! Practically the whole last act!)

To illustrate the difference, imagine you're setting a book in Boston. Your characters are walking and talking on Boston streets, riding the T, and eating at restaurants. Honestly, if you can recall some of the sounds and smells, or the way the wind blows in the winter, you can get by writing all of those character interactions with a street map and a bunch of Google images saved in a file.

Now imagine a sniper is shooting at your characters, who have to snag a car and careen through the streets to the waterfront. Where can the sniper set up? How far away? What's the angle? Can cars park there, or will your heroes have to run? How fast does the traffic move? One way? (trick question: it's all one way in Boston.) When they get out of a car, what things can they hide behind? Where would the bad guys have set up, anticipating our heroes next move?

Maybe other authors do it differently, but for me, producing a fast-paced, can't-catch-your-breath, slam-bang action sequence depends on meticulous planning and a deep understanding of all the physical elements involved. (This is why I think I would be VERY good at committing elaborate heists, btw.)

Even when I've made up the whole location, I still need a clear mental picture of geography, distances, structures. And it's SO MUCH WORSE when it's a real place. A real place tens of thousands of people see every year. I can already see the torrent of emails and Goodreads reviews taking me to task for my sloppy research.

 

So I'm ushering in the finale by constantly referencing maps, charts, photos, etc. etc. All while trying to write in such a way that the eventual reader has a seamless, emotional, and exciting time once the book is out in the world. Needless to say, it's slowing me to a crawl.

Oh, and the second thing. Stress/bad ergonomics/overwork has given me a burning muscle spasm running from beneath my scapula right up the side of my neck and down to my left bicep. It's been bothering me for a week now, and yesterday I finally took action by downloading Microsoft's free voice-to-text app. I trained on it, and trained it, and my first day's word count using it is... not good.  I can tell this is going to be a steep learning curve for both of us. It doesn't help that it thinks my main characters' names are Ross and layer.

I'd like to get to the point where I can comfortably compose by voice, at which point I'd be willing to invest in Dragon, which everyone seems to agree is the bomb-diggity. I know I can change the way I interact with words and the page: I did it when I trained myself to do an initial draft on the computer keyboard, instead of longhand on paper. Of course, that was back in '86. I guess this is a chance to see just how much my brain has fossilized since then.

 I guess I have two questions for you, dear readers: How do you like your action scenes to flow? Is authenticity important to you?

And I'm welcoming suggestions to get my back muscles to calm down...