Moments of Clarity

Any place that anyone can learn something useful from someone with experience is an educational institution.
-- Al Capp, US cartoonist (1909-1979)

That, in brilliantly simplified terms, is why writers read. Why we must read. To learn from those who have gone before. The lessons aren't always, "Here's what you should do." Sometimes, sadly, they are, "Here's what you shouldn't do."

In the past couple of weeks I've read a sample of both. While I struggled for two weeks to get through one book, it took me a mere two days to devour the next one. And what I learned (again) was that I need to write the kind of book that I enjoy reading. That's one of those "duh" statements that most of my writer friends will roll their eyes at me for. The author of the book I struggled with didn't have me in mind while he was writing, of course. It's geared toward a specific audience, a demographic of which I am not a part, i.e. males, sailors and spies. (Hmmm ... now, there's a question - do spies read spy thrillers like they're how-to books?)

I write romantic suspense. Pure and simple, if there is such a thing. No bodice ripping hot sex or anything, but yeah, there's some man-meets-woman stuff going on. And I'm dropping a few dead bodies along the way, which makes life a little more interesting for said man and woman.

In the current WIP, I've been fighting with focal points and whether to reveal certain secrets earlier rather than later. The book has a fairly large cast of characters, and defining two of them as my "focus" characters helped gel the story a bit. Once JT came up with the new (and bloody brilliant) title, the whole thing took on a completely new identity. It's that identity that is shaping how I'm looking at one of my focal characters, and deciding whether to reveal his "secret" from the beginning and not make it a secret at all.

In the book I just finished reading, the two main characters (it was a romance) were both writers - one a novelist and one a journalist. The journalist was struggling with the opening of an article he was writing, and the novelist told him that when she had that problem, she knew it was her story telling her she was starting in the wrong place - much like JT's notion that "writer's block" is our story's way of telling us there's something wrong. When the journalist approached his story from a different angle and started it in a different place, it flowed like water from a broken dam and he was able to write it without further difficulty.

In diving back into this rewrite, I'm going to take the advice of this fictional novelist - more appropriately, albeit vicariously, from the author herself (who is now one of my new favorites) - together with JT's added insight, and approach this character and his story from a different starting point. Maybe I can find the same spark that the journalist did and get excited about this book again.

So, as Bizet's Farandole reverberates through the study, I am going to focus on a guy named Vitrelli, whom very few of you have met but hopefully most of you will someday. In the meantime, there are lots of other books out there, just waiting to be read.

=) JB