skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Showing posts with label
Book Passage Mystery Writing Conference.
Show all posts
Showing posts with label
Book Passage Mystery Writing Conference.
Show all posts
HALLIE EPHRON: Welcome to another week-long episode of WHAT WE'RE WRITING! I get to kick off with another installment of WHAT I'M NOT WRITING. Promoting and teaching have been keeping more than busy these last few months.
Since CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR launched, I’ve been running around speaking at bookstores and libraries and events and teaching at writing conferences. Since August I’ve given writing workshops at:
- Surrey International Writers Conference in Vancouver, BC, teaching a new workshop I call "Classic Fiction Writing Rules and When You Can Break Them" plus "Suspense 3 Ways" (which turned out to be Suspense 5 Ways.)
I love to teach, and I’ve been a teacher for far longer than I’ve been a writer. I think of my book on how to write a mystery novel as my ‘ticket to ride.’
There's no greater thrill than returning to a writing conference, meeting writers whom I met with a year or two earlier, and hearing how their work is progressing and the epiphanies they've had along the way.
You’d think by now I’d have at least a dozen ‘canned’ presentations ready to go, but I hate teaching exactly the same thing twice, and each time out I have new things to say about those old chestnuts: character, setting, plot, dialogue, suspense, viewpoint…
Recently I noticed one of the problem many aspiring writers had was figuring out what exactly they were writing. It often boiled down to: mystery, thriller, or suspense? Of course most crime novels are a mixture but when you’re pitching your idea, it’s good to know where it most comfortably fits. It’s not that easy to articulate the differences. Like porn, you know it when you see it.
But I gave it a shot. Beginning with the idea that some novels fit neatly into one category. Then starting with some examples, we went from the cover, to the author photo, to the jacket copy, talking about mystery/suspense/thriller, and the fundamental question the novels addresses:
Whodunnit? A mystery
What’s going on here? Suspense
What’s going to happen next? Thriller
Some novels fit neatly into one category.
Others are a blend.
And, most importantly, each of us has a sweet spot, somewhere in that Venn diagram. As a writer or as a reader, what’s yours?
DEBORAH CROMBIE: Every so often you run across a book that you absolutely love. It may seem a bit odd that there are crime novels that create a world you don't want to leave, but it does happen. It takes just the right combination of story, setting, and character, but when it happens, it's magic.
I've been a fan of David Hewson's books since I met him at the Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference in Corte Madera, California a few years ago. (I was on tour for In a Dark House, I think, so it's been a good few years! And that, by the way, is also how I met Hallie! It's a terrific workshop for aspiring writers.) I picked up one of David's Nic Costa novels, set in Rome, and was immediately hooked. So when I heard a few months ago that David had a new novel coming, set in Florence, called The Flood, I couldn't wait to read it. Here's a little synopsis.
Florence, 1986. A seemingly inexplicable attack on a church fresco of Adam and Eve brings together an unlikely couple: Julia Wellbeloved, an art student, and Pino Fratelli, a semi-retired detective who longs to be back in the field.
Their investigation leads them to the secret society that underpins the city, and back to the darkness in Florence’s past: the night of the great flood in 1966.
Rich in the culture of Tuscany’s most mysterious city, The Flood takes a dazzling trip back into the history of Florence, recent and as distant as that of the Medici.
The book is terrific--one of my best picks for the year. But David can tell you about it much better than I can.
DAVID HEWSON: I’ve written so many books set in Italy that I have sit to back and count them. Lucifer’s Shadow almost fifteen years ago. Then came nine Nic Costa novels, mostly set in Rome. This is where the Nic Costa series actually starts.After that there was another Venetian kind of standalone, Carnival for the Dead which featured one of the Costa series most popular characters, Teresa Lupo.
And now we have The Flood set in Florence, with scenery like the wonderful Medici dwarf in the Boboli gardens you see here. So that’s a round dozen. Over the last twenty years my books have encompassed Spain, the US, the adaptations of The Killing TV series in Copenhagen, and now a new crime series set in Amsterdam. The fact these are all lovely places to work and visit apart, why do I do this? Aren’t we all supposed to ‘write about what you know’?
Well I don’t believe in rules for writing, and even if I did I wouldn’t think any of them were universal. ‘Write about what you know’ may be great advice for some, but rotten for me. My very first book back in the Nineties was set in a city much like Seville during Holy Week. I was a working journalist at the time and couldn’t afford the time and money to go there to research it. So I simply created a fictional Andalucian city and wrote the damned thing anyway.
Semana Santa got me a three-book deal and was later made into a movie. And yes, I did get a few letters saying that I’d made ‘mistakes’ when it came to portraying Spain. But just as many saying I captured the true spirit of the place too.
Five books later I made the decision to focus on Italy, moving to Rome for a while to enroll at a language school and try to see the world through Italian eyes. It was probably the best investment I ever made.
Writing about what you don’t know works for me on many fronts. For one thing it makes me work, and if writing isn’t work then something’s wrong. I have to deal with a foreign language, culture, and history. I need to read background books and learn to navigate strange cities. I must pound alien pavements, taking pictures, imagining scenes. Those photos are important by the way and I still keep them. Here’s a grainy photo of Tiber Island taken on a rainy February day in 2001.
Books must build worlds, in the heads of both author and reader. By assembling all this material about places I don’t know, I have to construct my locations from the ground up brick-by-brick. It wouldn’t be the same if it was London or some place around the corner.
And the great thing is you develop a routine. In 2011, with my friend A.J. Hartley, I produced an audio novel of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Now this is a fascinating play, but it’s full of holes. We’ve no idea, for example, why Macbeth begins as a hero and abruptly turns in a bloody villain. I hopped on a plane to Scotland and spent a week exploring Macbeth’s real-life Highlands — here’s a photo of Birnam wood, part of his comeuppance. 
It’s a beautiful part of the world, and there was the clue to his character.
Our Macbeth is a patriot, killing Duncan to oppose tyranny, just as Brutus and Cassius murdered Caesar to maintain the Roman republic. Could I have got that out of a book or Google Maps? Not in a million years.
The Flood is a standalone novel, not part of the Nic Costa series. While I tried quite hard to picture a Costa book set in Tuscany every effort stumbled on a simple obstacle: the characters don’t fit.
Romans are southerners, colourful, sociable, outward-looking. Whereas Florence has a darkness to it, a grim side visible in the fortress-like architecture of its rusticated palaces. Rome has always been a show-off, keen to display its glories to the world. Florence, especially under the Medici, preferred to keep them hidden and show them only to the privileged few.
It took a lot of visits before that became clear, and only when it did could I began to grasp the story I wanted to write.
The tale begins in Rome in 1942 where a young Jewish boy is being smuggled out of the ghetto to keep him out of the hands of Mussolini’s thugs. We then move forward to the winter of 1966 and a terrible real-life flood which claimed more than thirty lives in the city.
Then, for the bulk of the story, we find ourselves in 1986, dealing with two far from complementary characters desperate to unravel secrets from both those previous eras. One is an eccentric carabinieri officer, Pino Fratelli, the second is a young Englishwoman, Julia Wellbeloved, fleeing a failed marriage, thinking she can find herself in the art and history of Florence.
I want the reader to feel they’re there walking the streets with Pino and Julia, feeling her disgust when he stops for a Florentine snack of tripe, and his wonder at the marvelous paintings in the Brancacci Chapel and San Marco. I can’t think of any way to achieve that without going to the place myself. I know. It’s a tough life. But someone has to do it.
Jules Verne wrote Around the World in Eighty Days and he’d never set foot outside Europe. But today the world’s a smaller place, which makes it so much harder to create a vivid version of it for readers’ eyes.
So what do you think? Can you write convincingly about somewhere without going there? Or is fiction just that… made-up stuff and the secret’s in the making?
DEBS: You can probably guess where I stand on David's question. I think writers can build any world they can imagine, convincingly, but it does take work. REDS and readers, what do you think?
While you're contemplating, I want to have another Negroni in a cafe in Florence with Pino and Julia....
And David, I have to ask: Wellbeloved is such wonderful name. How did you come up with that?
David will be dropping in to respond to comments, and will pick a lucky commenter to receive a copy of The Flood.
One last thing, although certainly not least. Be sure to follow David on his blog, where you'll find some of the best advice I've come across on writing. And David's book about writing a novel, Writing: A User Manual, is a terrific resource for both new and experienced writers. I'm hoping he'll come back and talk to us about that!
JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: It's now two weeks after Memorial Day, and no one could say it's not truly summertime. The temperatures in the Northeast have risen into the 70s, college graduations are over and high schoolers will finish marching across the stage this week. Kids are squirming in their seats as the end of the school year nears. Seasonal attractions have reopened, women are pulling out their sandals and getting pedicures, and Farmers Markets are swinging into high gear. Summer!
The possibilities for trips, activities and things to do are endless, and, unfortunately, I often find by Labor Day that I've let a lot of those possibilities slip through my fingers. So this year, I've decide to make a summer bucket list (not that I expect to kick the bucket at the end. It's a sand bucket. On a beach.) I'm going to write down the things I want to do, and as events pop up in the newspaper or opportunities present themselves, I will act on them - buying tickets, making reservation, confirming with friends - and add the events to my calendar. There are always constraints of money, or time, or availability, but I'm not going to qualify any of the items on my list, because once you start to add "if I can afford it" or "when a slot opens" you're already halfway to forgetting about what you wanted to do in the first place. So here's my initial list:
Attend a Sea Dogs game. The local AA team plays great baseball - several Sea Dogs alums have gone up to the majors - and is a fun, inexpensive day out.
See at least two Shakespeare plays. We have the fabulous Theater at Monmouth within an easy drive, as well as Fenix Theater performing in Deering Oaks Park in Portland and MaineStage Shakespeare in Kennebunk. The latter two are free! No reason not to catch Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Julius Caesar, The Winter's Tale or A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Wiggle my toes in the sand at Old Orchard Beach. Stroll the Boardwalk. Give Youngest money to ride the rides while the rest of us gorge on sausages, fries, and fried dough.
Thrillerfest in New York City!
Float with friends down the Saco River. It's literally less than 200 yards from my house. In a related vein:
Invite folks over to barbeque. We've always struggled with a beautiful yard and garden area that had nowhere to host grilling parties. No more! Ross and The Boy have already broken ground on a slate patio large enough for a fire pit on one end and the grill and its acoutrements on the other. I can taste those burgers already.
I can think of more, but that's enough to be getting on with. How about you Reds? What;s on your list for summer?
SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Finish novel, finish novel, finish novel.
Is that a little obsessive? OK, swim in ocean off Naranganset with the family, have a lobster roll at Aunt Carrie's, staycation in NYC (housesitting a Tribeca loft large enough to roller-skate in) and take Kiddo to see Les Miz for the first time. Watch fireflies in the courtyard at dusk!
LUCY BURDETTE: Finish novel, finish novel, finish novel LOL! Also brainstorm new projects. Visit John's family in Maine. 
Visit friends at Long Pond, MA. Make choux puff pastry stuffed with coffee creme and covered with chocolate or caramel. Read more--yikes if you could only see my pile!! Play a little golf. Have a drink or two at the beach. In other words, find time to relax:).
HALLIE EPHRON: Wish we had fireflies... when I was in Ohio last summer they were everywhere and it was magical.
This is a good exercise, because the only summer list I’d made so far goes like this: 1) replace the washing machine 2) get new garage doors 3) paint the house 4) replace the heating system 5) replace the storm door …
In between I hope to have some fun, starting with food: - Steamers and a lobster roll and onion rings from Tony’s Clam Shop on Wollaston Beach
- Burnt caramel ice cream from Toscanini’s in Cambridge
- My mother’s barbecued spareribs made here at home
- Tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes, and corn, corn, corn when the local crops comes upI’m won’t be at Thrillerfest but I will be at Book Passage’s Mystery Writing Conference in Corte Madera and Writer’s Digest’s annual conference in New York.
The icing on this particular cake will be my high school reunion in Beverly Hills – probably a genuine bucket list item.
HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Finish novel, finish novel, finish novel. I will be SO happy when I do!
We have a backyard pool, and one of the best things about summer is getting a blow-up raft, and a book, and some frozen lemonade. You clamber onto the raft, and read, floating around the pool, looking up through the tall leafy trees to the blue sky. It is so peaceful!
We are going out to Tanglewood in August, to hear the Boston symphony (including YoYo Ma playing Bach!) We're heading to the Cape for a weekend with friends, and will have a dinner in P'town. And I have SO many book events! Love that. I'll be at Thrillerfest, but only on Friday. No time!
I cannot wait for the delicious tomatoes and corn--we love to grill them outside. And the kids are coming for the 4th of July-so we'll have lobsters and champagne and proseco and watch the fireworks from the Esplanade.
Oh, Hallie, I went to our 40th reunion like, ten years ago. I walked in, took one look and remember thinking: "Oh, I'm in the wrong place. These are all somebody's parents!"
But I really have to finish the book. And 2 short stories. I will be SO happy when I do!
JULIA: Hank, I'm coming down to your house to make sure you actually get into the pool this summer!
DEBORAH CROMBIE: Finish novel, finish novel, finish novel.... LOL. Actually, it's not due until October 1st, but that doesn't mean that I don't have to write like it's due September 1st, as damned slow as I am. BUT, I am not traveling, I have a brand new gorgeous flagstone patio and new landscaping, and I mean to enjoy them!
In fact, Julia, I crossed several things off my summer bucket list this past weekend: 1)Visiting Klyde Warren Park in downtown Dallas. This new park is built OVER the freeway, and it's incredibly cool. My daughter took me for a birthday lunch at the restaurant in the park and it was amazing. I want to go back with at least one of the dogs and sample things from the many food trucks. 2) On Saturday we had a barbecue and sat on the deck and new patio. Julia, I hope you like yours as much! 3) On Sunday, I took a real day off. Did only minimal chores, read some of the NYT (which has been piling up for a couple of months), sat on the aforementioned patio in the cool morning shade with a cup of tea, watching the dogs play, AND best of all, I spent an hour in my hammock, just looking at the trees overhead. Absolute bliss.
So I want to do all of these things some more. And make homemade lemonade and root beer floats. I want to take a photo of the Sno Cone stand down the street just at dusk. I want to sit on the front porch and watch the fireflies, ditto a summer storm. I want to watch fireworks on the 4th (we totally missed it last year...) , and I want to go to the wonderful farmer's market here early on Saturday mornings.
Hank, I am so envious that you are getting to see YoYo Ma play Bach...
JULIA: I, too, have to finish novel, finish novel, finish novel. Sadly, it's not a special summertime event - as I tell my students, being an author is like having a term paper due...forever. If anyone from my publishing house or my agency is reading this, rest assured that I'll only just slip in my summer bucket list items between relentless bouts of writing!
How about you, dear readers? What's on your list for summer?
I love to teach, and I’ve been a teacher for far longer than I’ve been a writer. I think of my book on how to write a mystery novel as my ‘ticket to ride.’ 
