Just click below.  PDFs of the book covers and chapters are shown for all titles:

Just click on  the image below.  PDFs of the book covers and chapters are shown for all titles:

Just click on the image below.  PDFs of the book covers and chapters are shown for all titles:

The words in the title that are spoken in Act III, Scene 2 of  Shakespeare’s remarkable Macbeth convey the subtext of the whole play, from the opening scene of thunder and lightning and three witches to the moment Macduff places Macbeth’s severed head before the new King Malcolm.

In their subtle layering the words are of great portent, as Shakespeare intended them to be. Macbeth is speaking to his wife, whose own state of mind has become precarious because she is wracked by guilt. Each word is significant and none wasted. The two of them are already complicit in the murder of King Duncan, two guards, and the heir apparent, Banquo.

More death and guilt will follow for them, but by now in the play they have both succumbed to an evil grown out of their shared and fierce political ambition.

There are no boundaries. Nothing matters but that Macbeth should be King.

How Is So Much Conveyed?

There is a current beneath these eleven words, a motion and emotion as meanings intertwine, drawn out of the merging of their Anglo-Saxon and French roots, both.

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The American Way…

These 10 quotes that explain American politics are but a small selection. Americans have been watching, observing, and commenting on their politicians for several hundred years. As yet, there are very few positive offerings, for most appear (how extraordinary!) to doubt the actual effectiveness of our elected officials to uphold the principles of our Founding Fathers.

As July 4th approaches, here are a few observations that struck me as relevant today, in this election year, suggesting that our candidates would do well to remember the people at least half the time (instead of themselves all the time) when they set up their eager agendas.

Some American Classics

“Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.” –Mark Twain

“The taxpayers are sending congressmen on expensive trips abroad. It might be worth it except they keep coming back.” –Will Rogers

“I love to go to Washington, if only to be near my money.” –Bob Hope

“There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” –Mark Twain

“This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when a baby gets hold of a hammer.” –Will Rogers

 “Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession.  I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.”  –Ronald Reagan

“Members of Congress should be compelled to wear uniforms like NASCAR drivers, so we could identify their corporate sponsors.” –Caroline Baum

“If his IQ slips any lower, we’ll have to water him twice a day.”
  –Molly Ivins, about a member of Congress

“Congress is so strange; a man gets up to speak and says nothing, nobody listens, and then everybody disagrees.”  –Will Rogers

“We have the best Congress money can buy.” –Mark Twain

“Tempête de Neige” exposé en 1842 de J.W. Turner
Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth making Signals in Shallow Water, and going by the Lead

The Artist’s Way

As a writer whose life is immersed in words, I have an inevitable and contrary fascination with the passion of artists who paint and draw their images instead of writing them, people like J.M.W. Turner or Georgia O’Keeffe or Thomas Hart Benton or Monet. For them there was a need to create their works non-stop, as if they were trying to keep up with the flow of what they saw and felt before they were trapped into stasis by the avalanche of ideas that came to them unceasingly. They had nothing like the angst that writers so often describe, no blocks, no hesitation or self-doubt. With or without applause, their lives were too filled with the passion to get the image on paper or canvas to worry very often or very much about whether someone approved. Yes, they felt competitive, yes, they made choices that were sometimes flawed, and many succumbed to a life that seldom held a cautionary approach, be it with their lovers or their families or the way they chose to live. What they did do was live their passion.

Musicians are much the same. I recall Philip Glass answering an interviewer when asked if there was ever a time he didn’t think about music. He said it was always with him, that often he felt he was holding down a cauldron of sound, letting a little of it out at a time, but worlds of it waited to be released. No, he said, there was never a moment when he didn’t hear the music.

Seeding the Stories

The point here, one to be explored in other posts to follow, is that it is the same for writers. We are never without the image and sound of the words that grab us. A phrase on a piece of scrap paper is as much evidence of this as a formal page typed in its final revision. I find notes everywhere…in old boxes of forgotten stories, in the pocket of a coat, in a drawer of receipts, in a handbag, or pushed between the pages of a book. I find the outline of a story on the back of bill envelopes from years ago. They serve as the apprentice notes for stories not yet written or ones that don’t need to be, or that appear later as if out of the blue, having already been seeded, and they are as ubiquitous as breathing.

I think writer’s block is not a sign that inspiration is not there but rather a sign that so much of it is, we can become afraid of opening it up, like Glass’ cauldron. When we do, we sense the passion that won’t let go. We take a step that can’t be retracted, and we can’t assume an instant longer that we don’t care. We do. The words are there.

Have you ever started to write a mystery short story and have it stall on you? Have you gotten to the middle chapter and realized you have no idea how to end the story, much less how to keep the pacing, momentum, and dialogue enthralling for your potential readers?

Unless you manage to sort that out, two things are likely: either you give up writing the story altogether, or you finish it somehow and hope the magazines you send it to won’t notice the problems. Of course, they will notice, and you will receive a rejection slip you’d rather live without.

You want to keep readers (and magazine editors) turning the pages until the end, preferably in one sitting. The thing is, many of us create good characters, have a great setting, and know who our villain is, BUT . . . if our plot is in limbo?

Here are 7 ways to write a mystery short story that just might help you pull that plot together, discover its inner logic, find its core purpose, and speed forward to a timely–and satisfying–conclusion:

1. Write the plot backwards. Seriously. Write the ending. Write down what happens just before the ending. Write down what happens just before that. Do this for ten steps back. You’ll be amazed at what you discover. Sometimes this process can reveal hidden elements of a character’s behavior, or even lead you to change who the villain is!
2. Read what you have written so far out loud to yourself. When you get to the point where you’ve stalled, put down the pages, look steadily into the space in front of you, and keep telling the story. Don’t worry if it sounds ridiculous, just keep talking for at least three minutes–nonstop talking and no thinking is the key.  (This can be done in a train station or a grocery line, safely–pretend to be one of those people who wear Bluetooth devices and constantly look like they’re talking to themselves.)
3. Sometimes the stall in your writing is because you don’t relate to one or more of the characters. This is a good time to write up some back story–information you’ll never put into the story but that makes the character more real to you. You aren’t likely to include in the story the fact the female detective has a hobby making bead earrings to relax, but it adds a dimension to her character that makes her more accessible to you. The villain could have a back story that includes a violent temper that is never shown (until the end). Every character benefits from a bit of back story, and so does your writing.
4. Read the first line of your story as it would be spoken by each character. This will change your perception of your opening line, and help you decide if it is a good hook, but it will also help you see if you have set up the story well. A stall in the writing can occur if we’re not sure about how (or why) everything starts.
5. Turn the pages you’ve written upside down and skim through them one after the other. Of course you can’t read them (unless you’re a typesetter, and few of those are left anymore) but you will get the feeling of how much you have done. Looking at the pages upside down, you can’t distract yourself by editing anything, so you get instead a feeling-tone, the weight of what you are doing, and it holds power.
6. Write six titles for the story that do not resemble each other. Throw them in a box and pick out one at random. Type it on the computer (or write it on the yellow legal pad) as the title of your mystery short story. Imagine adding it to the “Subject” line in emails you send to magazine editors. Then discard it. Do the same for two more you pick at random. Discard them. Leave the story title space blank. Amazingly, the plot begins to surface with a clarity that wasn’t there before.
7. Listen to the characters you have created. They always have something to say, and often they can reveal (or become) the solution you need to whatever plot point is stopping you from finishing the story.

Writing a mystery short story is a wonderful thing to do. Give it your patience, and trust. Keep in mind it’s a willing collaboration between imagination and heart.

In actual numbers, consider this–the word “run” in English (according to the Oxford English Dictionary) has over 170 meanings, the word “set” has over 400, and the word “turn” has over 200! At Dictionary.com you can see at least 119 definitions for the word “set” along with origin of the word before 900 A.D. and other variations!

Why indeed do English words have so many meanings? The richness–and confusion–of the English language has arisen out of twenty centuries of adjustment to invaders of the British Isles since before the Romans stepped on shore, and a subsequent willingness to incorporate and integrate new words from the cultures of those same invaders. To make the words belong…

The influences that shaped the words we now use have come from Latin, German, French, and Scandinavian (those ravaging Vikings!) sources, among others, and those sources were constantly in flux, changed, and altered. Each one overlaid another and was woven as well into local dialects. As a result, the language we use now evolved out of a vast kaleidoscope of multiple definitions for the same word, words that sound the same but have different meanings, words that lend themselves to double meanings, and words that mean the opposite of what they seem to be. Those are just some of the aspects that have created this complex and fantastic language.

The outcome of all this for English has been the development of a deep and creative and omnipresent subtext, the subtle meaning that underlies the intention of words, so that what is said, says more. Take, for example, the phrase from Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “Light thickens, and the crow/Makes wing to th’ rooky wood.” It appears at a point when day is turning into night, when sleep should come. It implies the darkness of the woods, made even deeper by the use of “rooky”–for rook is another name for crow, but also for a piece in a game of chess. There is an anticipation implied in the words “makes wing”–some event is in transit. A few short words hint and summarize the import of the play–the impending darkness of the choices Macbeth will make in the terrible game he has chosen to play that flies in the face of reason.

If that seems like interpretation, it is–but the intention comes through the words themselves, even without explanation. The very sound of the words creates the sense of impending doom.

In the next post I’ll explore a few more of these. They really are intriguing in other contexts, as well.

P.D. James once said that she wrote mysteries because it was a way to bring order to a chaotic world, to restore what had come apart into balance again.

Ray Bradbury said that “Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal. So Martian Chronicles is not science fiction, it’s fantasy. It couldn’t happen, you see? That’s the reason it’s going to be around a long time– because it’s a Greek myth, and myths have staying power.”

Josh Vogt wrote that “Hope gives us strength, and fantasy and science fiction—to me, at least—embody that virtue in many ways… Even if there’s danger or even death along the way, we have the ability to be brave and persevere in the hope of reaching a better existence.”

These three writers describe the quintessential element of genre fiction— the mysteries and explorations and world building give a feeling of what is possible and hopeful in a world that often seems hesitant to embrace either. This is unlike literary fiction—contemporary literary fiction, at least—where there seems a consistent and continuous need to create grim plots, characters who cannot prevail, and bleak settings.

Why else does genre fiction appeal to us so much? Because it is real storytelling, and readers of genre fiction know this. It draws us in and engages us and we find that we are the better for it. When we close the book we feel that something is right with the world and that this is a good thing to know. If some message is in those stories, it is likely disguised, and we do not need to dissect it to appreciate the experience of receiving whatever it is.

All good writing brings escape of some sort, makes time disappear and the characters live for a while in our minds or hearts or both. The marvelous aspect of the detective story, the science fiction journey, or the shimmering fantastic world is that we want to be there, and for a time, we are.

It could be said that all great storytellers write in genres, be they the ancient myths of the gods to Shakespeare’s dramas to all ventures into inner and outer space. The readers know this, too.