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LUCY BURDETTE: I don't have a thing to add to today's blog from Susan Hubbard--I just know you're going to love it!
SW HUBBARD: I feel the woman’s gaze boring into me as I browse the housewares aisle at Target. I glance her way. She quickly averts her eyes.
A moment later, I feel a tap on my shoulder. I know what comes next.
“I love your hair,” the staring woman says. “I just had to tell you.”
I’ve been getting that a lot lately. Ever since I made the radical decision to stop dyeing my hair.
I started going gray at the age of twenty-five, while I was still a single girl in Manhattan.
Horrified, I used henna to make the gray strands look like tiny red highlights.
By the time I was thirty, the henna wasn’t doing the trick anymore. I turned to permanent dye: Nice and Easy 118A, Natural Medium Brown, which matched the color I’d been born with. By then I was married, and my husband, complaining that I smelled like a toxic waste dump after the application, begged me not to color my hair.
“Your mother dyes her hair,” I answered. “I’m damned if I’m going to have more gray than she does.”
The next twenty years found me periodically locked in the bathroom, shivering for half an hour in a ratty old bathrobe with a pile of brown 118A glop on my head. To pass the time, I’d read although it was hard to turn pages wearing plastic gloves. Sometimes I’d get absorbed in a novel, and my hair would come out Ronald Reagan black. Sometimes I’d cut the time short to referee squabbling kids, and patches of gray would show through. Inevitably, I’d splash dye on the tile grout, the paint, or my library book.
Despite his reputation for thrift, my husband implored me to go to a salon. Thus began ten years of spending two hours every six weeks at Trendz in the capable hands of my colorist and my stylist. I’d leave evenly colored but $140 + tips poorer. Within two weeks, a white skunk stripe would appear along my part-line. Covering that up before the next dye job required two more products: brown spray-in color and root touch-up solution.
One day I floated an idea to my stylist. “I’m thinking of letting my hair go natural.”
He was horrified. Said I’d look old. Assured me I’d hate it. (Of course, my decision would halve his income.) But over the next weeks I kept studying my silver roots. They were kind of pretty.
And I was tired, so tired, of the struggle to stay brown.
More than the money, I really resented the time I had to sacrifice to this Sisyphean battle. So I returned to the salon with my mind made up. “How long do you think it will take? My hair grows so fast.” (I wasn’t willing to cut my hair short.)
“A year.”
“No way! Well, let’s strip the brown dye out of my hair.”
“That takes six hours and costs $800.”
Stunned, I went home and bought two hats to cover the increasingly visible skunk stripe. And, positive my stylist didn’t know what he was talking about, I applied my mystery author research skills to find a product to rush the process along. Google had plenty of advice about fading the brown dye: a paste of citric acid and Head and Shoulders shampoo was the least toxic; a product called Color Oops, which produced a chemical mushroom cloud that brought me to my knees, was the most.
The brown never disappeared, but gradually the hard lines of the skunk stripe softened, and I achieved an ombre look: silver on top tipped with brown ends. A young man at REI told me my hair was foxy. I know what I wanted to believe, but I’m pretty sure he meant I resembled a small forest animal.
Finally, after a full year, my stylist snipped away the last of the brown. I was totally silver. We both stared at me in the mirror.
“I gotta say, I like it,” he admitted.
So did I.
Yesterday I was in CVS when I felt “the look.” This admirer strode right up to me. “I love your hair. What do you use to get it like that?”
I pivot from the hair products aisle empty-handed.
“Absolutely nothing.”
***
Do you color your hair? Would you ever stop? If you’ve stopped, do you toy with going back?
S.W. Hubbard writes the kinds of mysteries she loves to read: twisty, believable, full of complex characters, and highlighted with sly humor. She is the author of the 5-book Palmyrton Estate Sale Mystery Series and the 5-book Frank Bennett Adirondack Mountain Mystery Series. Tailspinner, the latest Frank Bennett Adirondack mystery, is available for preorder now. With all the time she’s saving by not coloring her hair, she hopes to release a new estate sale mystery, Treasure Built of Sand, in early 2019. She lives in Morristown, NJ, where she teaches creative writing to enthusiastic teens and adults, and expository writing to reluctant college freshmen. She LOVES book groups and would be happy to visit yours in person (in NJ) or via Skype.
Read the first chapters of her novels
Learn about sales and new releases by joining her mailing list or following her on BookBub or Facebook.
LUCY BURDETTE: It's always a pleasure to welcome my friend and fabulous writer Susan (aka SW) Hubbard to JRW. And this time she's written a wonderful essay about writing short stories versus novels. And Frank Bennett, one of my favorite protagonists of all time--is back. Thanks for visiting Susan, and take it away...
S.W. (Susan) HUBBARD: My inspiration for this blog post was a quote by Anton Chekhov I’d heard somewhere, “A novelist is someone who has failed at writing short stories.” I Googled it just to make sure I had the wording right, and lo and behold, I couldn’t find it anywhere on the Internet. So maybe Chekhov didn’t say it, but if he didn’t, he sure should have!
Writing a short story is damn hard work.
Saying something significant in a much smaller space presents the writer with a tantalizing, sometimes maddening, challenge. A novel is like a mural—the success lies in the epic scope, the sweep, of the picture. A muralist, and a novelist, needs a big vision, and a lot of stamina. But a mural is best viewed from a distance, so the accuracy of every single brush stroke is not so crucial. Similarly, as long as a novel’s plot keeps ripping forward, the reader is likely to overlook a few unnecessary words, happy to be swept along on the ride.
A short story, on the other hand, is more like a Faberge egg. The success lies in the details, the intricacy. We study it so closely, marveling at the craftsmanship, that if there were a flaw, surely it would jump right out at us. Because the scope of a short story is smaller, every single word counts for more.
Just as writing a short story is challenging, so is reading one. Many reader reviews of short story anthologies contain sentences like, “Just when I got interested in the story, it was over…” or “I wanted this to be longer…” These readers feel that they’d like the short story a lot better if only it were a novel. But no one looks at a Faberge egg and says, “I’d like this egg more if it covered a whole wall.”
Short stories place different demands on the reader. They ask us to consider closely the protagonist and how he or she is changed by the events of the story. The spotlight is almost always on the relationship of two people, without the big cast of supporting characters that give a novel its scope. For readers of mystery stories, this can mean giving up some of the fun of subplots, clues, and red herrings to focus more intently on motivation. Why is often more important than who. The satisfaction of the ending often lies in asking yourself, “What would I have done in this situation?”
I had three mystery novels in print before I finally screwed up my courage to tackle a short story.
The story began with a scene I cut from a novel because it didn’t move the narrative forward. But an image from that scene—a statue of St. Joseph, stolen from a Nativity tableau—wouldn’t leave me alone. Why had the statue been stolen? And why Joseph, not Mary or Jesus? I had to write the story to find out. The answer was significant although not epic enough to carry an entire novel.
That story, “Chainsaw Nativity,” first appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and it is one of three short stories included in my new anthology, Dead Drift. All three are set in the small Adirondack mountain town of Trout Run, NY and feature police chief Frank Bennett. In each story, Frank’s struggle to unravel his own emotions is as complicated as his quest to solve the crime.
Writing short stories has given me a new appreciation for reading them. I don’t read an anthology straight through—that would be like eating a dozen eggs in a row! I like to keep a collection of short stories handy to dip into from time to time. Reading a short story or two between novels gives me a better appreciation of both forms. What about you? How do you read short stories?
To learn more about Dead Drift, and the other anthologies in which her short stories have appeared, please visit Susan's website.
