With a mystery, the question of how to end the story begins with which character did the crime. I no longer start with a specific villain in mind. The story often changes so much in the writing that a pre-planned ending has no choice but to change as well, or it wouldn’t make much sense.

In the last couple of mysteries I’ve written, I was as surprised as anyone by who the villain turned out to be once I got to the second draft or later. That’s okay, and it has a lot to do with how I develop characters. If I know who the villain is too early, I’m in danger of giving it away, offering hints I’m not even aware of because of my judgments about that character.

If I start out thinking the villain isn’t a villain, I can get to the heart of that character sooner in my own mind. I can get to know him, let him grow and round out on the page. I’m an idealist, and I really like to see the best in people, so there needs to be that spark of sympathy first, without letting on even to myself that he or she is a killer in the making. I guess in that regard my characterization is as organic as raising a child. What mother imagines her infant would harm anyone?

This process forces me to explore the shadows, my characters’ shadows as well as my own, to see possible motivations, both conscious and unconscious.

I first encountered the shadow, as a human concept, in stories I read. I confess that I didn’t understand the concept very well when I was young and still in denial that I had a shadow or that any good person did. But one encounters this idea many times, if one reads at all widely, and the reason for that is it’s a universal truth about human nature.

In exploring the shadows, I’ve come to see that a fully rounded character, even if he’s the good guy, has a shadow, whether that shadow is clear on the page or not, whether that shadow is negative or positive. I want to know each major character’s background as well as possible, so I start with the positives and work my way into the negatives. Though it hurts me to watch a character I’ve come to like or sympathize with cross the line into murder, at least the biggest puzzle of the mystery isn’t lost on me, and I’m not giving the killer away up front. If I decide the murderer needs to be someone else, not the person I thought it was going to be, I don’t have to cast about too far for someone else who could have done it. In truth, any one of the characters might be capable of killing, given the right circumstances and motivation. They all have their shadows. By the time I get to my final draft, I usually have a few characters that, with nudges into poor choices and flawed rationalization, could become much darker individuals. That’s usually a key to how I end the story. Which character, which nudges, and which choices? Which fits this need best? What motivates the villain to do the awful deed and also causes him or her to get caught in the end? How will the reader be surprised and at the same time see that this person and the clues leading there were present all along? (Foreshadowing will have to wait for another post.)

My exploration of the shadows has made me think a lot about the choices we make in life, and how important each one is, especially when we stack one choice on top of another in the way that we sometimes come to think of as inevitable. We don’t have a choice in everything, certainly, but sometimes when we look back over our lives or a course of events, we can see the turnings we’ve made, and many of them were choices, that brought each of us to be who, where, and what we are today. When we’re accountable for those choices, I think we improve our ability to move forward and make better ones.

If there’s one positive effect fiction can have, perhaps it’s to get us to take a look at the cause and effect of choices. What are we capable of? What would we do in the same situation, and where might that take us or what might it make of us, and our world with us? The stories that get me to think in those terms are the stories that stay with me.

We live in a filthy world of our own making, mostly made filthy through our mental twists on reality. It seems strange to me sometimes that when we’re out in wild places no amount of dirt seems out of place, yet in our neighborhoods and especially in our houses it can feel as if the whole of nature is intent on affronting our sense of cleanliness and order. Though my sense of order is weaker than some, I know everyone who lives indoors develops some degree of this need for order. Even the cat, to whom the state of her litter box and blankets matters a great deal, and the dog, who will go through all kinds of personal agony to wait to go outside to perform certain functions (thank God—or should that be Dog), and who gets nervous when I rearrange furniture in the living room. They like their people to be securely in place, too. He got so he knew the sound of my suitcase zipper when I used to travel for work, and would come into the bedroom when he heard it, to give me this look that made me feel like the worst kind of traitor. They both seem to go into fits when we so much as drive to the store, if we’ve been home a lot and they’ve grown used to that. When we return they greet us as returning heroes, and later the dog ceremoniously sniffs the soles of our shoes as if to learn where we’ve been—the usual places, or somewhere strange and exotic?

Orderliness is important to all of us who live under the umbrella of civilization. Not so much in nature, where a broken branch may hang by a thread for two seasons before falling to the ground and lying there for several more, gradually contributing its substance to the soil—what the ants don’t carry away or the termites consume. Maybe that’s order, too, in its way, and our skewed notion of order twists our perception of what is out of place, what must be plucked or added to the woodpile, burned in here so it doesn’t burn or rot out there.

The work of an artist or a writer requires some residual sense of the disorder in nature. A Japanese gardener calculates his design to mimic nature, if in a scrupulous, disorder-bending fashion. A painter avoids symmetry in her compositions. Some of the most amazing paintings I’ve seen depict skies full of drama rather than peace, states of cloud that in real life would make me wish we had a storm cellar. My favorite part of any piece of music is often full of drama, that exquisite break after a heart-rending crescendo. A writer fills his story with conflict, unresolvable problems and sympathetic characters full of flaws who perform acts we would never consider in real life. Why do we love this in artwork? Deep down, do we know everything isn’t supposed to be orderly all the time?

What is all this fuss over cleanliness and order? Can we carry it too far? Is that the reason that now, when our indoor world is in many ways its most orderly, we crave violence in the movies—and it increases in the streets? Is our twisted sense of order what makes us think we should control which two consenting adults marry, and push our religious or political agendas on others? Is it what makes us build walls at borders and regulate language? Is it what makes some people hoard wealth? Is it behind addiction and pornography?

Should order stop at the walls of our own houses? Is order’s purpose simply to help us feel secure in the future of meals to come, fresh water to drink, mortgages paid up? Do we try to make it fool us into thinking we’ll never die? Does it mimic the cycles of the seasons, the regularity of rainfall and harvest? Did order arise along with agriculture? Or did we find it in the vast movement of stars as we navigated seas full of monsters? What is it about order that lends us so much peace that we grow irritable or confused without it? Why do we grow a little insane from too much of it? Does it carry a deeper meaning? Is God order, or is God chaos? Or is God both, a balance, yin and yang? Where should we draw the line? Should there be a line?

Maybe I’ll draw the line today at leaving the vacuuming for tomorrow. It’s late, getting hot out, time to close the windows. Or is that too orderly, keeping the heat out and the cool in? I need to find my balance.

Late in 1993, after a lot of discouraging experiences attempting to sell my fiction, I decided to “quit fiction writing for good” and I wrote nothing but personal journals and technical manuals for a year. I began writing fiction again early in 1995, but with a difference. I did it, as I’d begun as a girl, to please myself, primarily to complete a story I thought had to be written or it would drive me nuts. That story had been percolating inside me since I was seventeen. I surprised myself then by doing some of the best fiction writing I had in my life to that point. My decision at that point to please only myself with what I wrote carried me through a kind of barrier into a different way of looking at writing fiction.

There’s a point where the writer has to throw out all the advice, all other opinions, and write the story that’s inside her, the one that haunts her, that begs to be written. If she begins to do it only to earn money or fame, her enthusiasm may dampen. If she exposes her writing to the wrong kinds of criticism at the wrong time, her passion may be crushed, or she may write more to please others than herself—sometimes so many others that she feels pulled in all directions at once. I’ve done that in the past, and I found myself doing it again recently—writing to please too many others. Maybe from time to time I need to “give up” again, if only to get back on track with the writing I’m supposed to do.

Of course the writer needs to learn the basics, hone her skills. Then, after writing for self, she needs to be willing to let someone edit her work and be open to revisions. The two-minute rule mentioned in the blog Eric referred to makes sense, too. Something in any story needs to draw the reader’s interest in as soon as possible, unless the writer just wants to hide her novel in a drawer and bring it out to read on her own now and then.

But I think a writer needs to begin any work of fiction out of love, a personal hunger to write it. Something has to draw the writer in, make it worth the effort, and perhaps make it impossible not to write. It may very well break the writer’s heart. In fact, maybe a writer has to let a story break her heart a little to do it right. Maybe fiction is meant to break out of one’s heart, the way love does. I usually know I’ve gotten somewhere or succeeded at something in a manuscript, when I find it brings me to some deep, heartfelt emotion.

Writing for myself sounds selfish and not very businesslike, but I think my best writing happens when I do. I’ve learned the most about myself when writing this way, and it’s the most honest writing I’ve done.

Themes emerge in what we write, truths we’ve learned about life show up in our stories, and we sometimes come face to face with our own humanity when we realize what we’re capable of imagining, when we think about what we’d do in the situations we place our characters in. These are things that don’t show up in a story intentionally, but in unconscious, serendipitous ways, through the interlocking and intersecting of seemingly disparate elements. The best writing is in many ways a revelation to the writer as much as to the reader. If getting to that necessitates shutting out what others want from our fiction, it’s worth the effort.

I can’t tell anyone how to make money writing fiction. It’s possible no one can tell anyone how. Publishers seem as mystified as anyone as to what will pay off and what won’t. But I do know how to plumb my own heart while writing, how to answer the call of a story. That’s what has kept me doing this so long in spite of all my frustrations and failures. If all I wanted were to make money, I’d have quit—for real and for good—long ago. I don’t advise anyone to write fiction for money. I plan from now on to write fiction that draws me in a way I can’t ignore and can’t resist. Even so, I know it may break my heart. But anything worthwhile in life carries that risk.

I got lost in the accompanying narrative, the setting, the characters’ activities, movements, body language, or overwrought cleverness. Sometimes I bogged down in the minutiae of sighing, nodding and eye gazing. Writers can get so caught up visualizing each detail of character interaction they rob readers of their mental interplay, their own visualizations based on common human experience. We presume readers don’t know how a character might deliver a line in a given situation. The stream of dialog reads as dammed up where it should flow. It loses its surface tension, its sparkle, and its undercurrent. It becomes stagnant.

Poorly managed narrative is part of the problem. Most dialog needs a little helping narrative to aid the reader’s orientation in the scene. Too much can create pauses that aren’t natural and interrupt the pace. Too little can cause the characters to move too quickly from one topic to another, making them appear to suffer from attention deficit disorder. Narrative placed well and in the right amounts creates natural pauses and shifts in dialog and action that don’t mimic but create life—the life of the story. The right narrative enhances the rhythm. It provides a satisfying ending to one scene, breaks that shift the topic or course of dialog within the scene, and a smooth transition into the next, all while holding the tension that keeps a reader turning pages. A good story follows the characters to precisely the places the reader needs them to go. To the reader it feels like a natural course of events, purely believable—no matter how the writer had to agonize in order to get there.

One dialog overhaul method that works for me is to copy the scene into an empty document, then strip out everything but what’s inside quotation marks. This allows me to start from the basic dialog. I trim that to its essentials, then work up to just the right helping narrative. If there’s a lot of action occurring at the same time as the dialog, it might help to strip that down as well, in a separate document—or as separate paragraph blocks differentiated by color in the same document—then work at merging the two into a cohesive whole. It’s easier, using this strip-down technique, to find where something is said that isn’t needed or doesn’t fit because it’s redundant, tangential, or just bad writing.

I read the characters’ words out loud and get a feeling for what they’re communicating underneath it all—to each other as well as the reader. How does the conversation flow? What’s needed and what isn’t, and in what order? Is there a shorter, snappier and more natural way to say something? Are all these words in character? Can I hear and differentiate the voices? Is the purpose of the scene being met? Am I missing an opportunity for humor, or drama? What are the characters saying between the lines, or what might someone mistake them for saying if I’m not careful? Why are they droning on, when what they need to say can be compressed into two lines of speech?

When I stop to think about it, I realize this is how I write dialog in a burst of inspiration. Just the speech, in a series of lines on paper, with a pencil, scribbling as fast as I can to get it all down before I lose the thread and my place inside the heads of the characters. The best dialog I’ve ever written has come to me that way. Why not force inspiration, by writing it that way to begin with?

When I’m writing fiction, I tend to read mostly nonfiction, often research related to what I’m writing, or a good book on writing, creativity, or personal growth. Anything that helps understand people and their motivations better is helpful to fiction writers, as well as anything that improves our story building skills and instincts—which isn’t necessarily limited to books on writing. I don’t go for the type of self-help books that offer quick fixes to personal problems. I classify most of those with fad diet books. But I’m drawn to books that help me understand human nature and the human experience on a deeper level.

My most recent satisfying nonfiction read is Sam Keen Inward Bound: Exploring the Geography of Your Emotions, first published in 1980 and revised in 1992 when it was resurrected from out-of-print limbo. This is the second time I’ve read this book, and I’ve come away with something new each time.

A few months ago I might’ve answered Susan’s question differently. I only recently realized I avoid reading fiction while I write it. I think it was a remark Eric Mayer made on his blog a few months ago that first prompted me to examine my reading habits. I sometimes try to pick up a novel while in the throes of a fiction writing cycle, only to notice I keep wanting to write instead, or that I begin to move away from my story in a way that isn’t helpful to my writing process. Now and then, when I burn out on my own work, I take a break and read fiction, but then I have to wiggle back into my story again. When I’m creating a populated fictional world I want to keep that world and its characters alive in my mind, not fill my mind with someone else’s. Reading fiction can inspire me to write, but I find that once I’m doing the creative bit, I’m caught up in a flow that I want to avoid interrupting unless I get stuck or burn out. I even sometimes find myself reading nonfiction from the mindset of a character in my story.

Movies and TV don’t have this effect, just reading. I watch my favorite movies and shows, and they don’t seem to hamper my illusory dream. But then I don’t have to work at watching those the same way my mind needs to be active while reading. If I was a TV writer or a movie maker that might be different.

I know I’m burning out when my own writing begins to invade my dreams at night, and those dreams prove more repetitive than refreshing. Then it’s time for a break. If it’s an extended break I may turn to novels.

Fiction writers need to read, and most enjoy reading lots of good writing, both fiction and nonfiction. My breaks tend to include some fiction, both as entertainment—one of my favorite forms, ever since I was a kid—and as a way of keeping up with the best work out there, letting the greats teach me by example. This year at this time I’m watching other blogs, reviewers, and reading lists like DorothyL, for their best reads of 2005, so I can build my own reading list to choose from at my next break. That way I won’t wind up one day, desperate for fiction, grabbing the first thing I glimpse in the grocery store—too often a source of disappointment. Word of mouth and careful browsing tend to lead me to the better books.

Some of the most recent comments here were disrupted by a MySQL database error, so one or two had to be reconstituted. If you made a comment or attempted to during that time, or if a comment you made appears with a different timestamp, my apologies.

I hope everyone is enjoying the gear up toward winter and the holidays. For me it’s refreshing just to have some cooler, moister weather. We were expecting rain tonight, but now it’s looking less likely. That’s how it goes most years. Welcome to Southern California, where we have drought or floods and nothing in between. If it’s not an El Nino year, rain is only a rumor.

But rules of writing aren’t the rules I’m concerned with breaking, at the moment.

What I’m puzzling over is how many rules a sleuth can get away with breaking within the confines of a mystery. Especially a sleuth who’s characterized as an honest, law-abiding citizen, as a particularly ethical person, or as a by-the-book law enforcement officer. I’m concerned about a sleuth I want to bring back in the next story in a series, rather than have him wind up in jail or out of work.

I have a dilemma. This character of mine is honest, sometimes to a fault. He’s a good guy, the kind you want your daughter to marry. But he may have to break some rules, in this story, and possibly tell some untruths. I find I have trouble even proposing that he do either. It’s something in me, perhaps, the part of me in which this character originates. I’m not a rule breaker. I’m a boring, goodie-two-shoes rule follower, and that trait may be in danger of keeping my characters too honest for their own good.

Now I’m picturing Adrian Monk, holding onto an assistant by the belt while the younger man leans as far as possible into someone’s home, to avoid stepping inside because they have no legal right to be there. That’s a classic illustration of how far rule breaking can stretch in a mystery.

The sub-genre makes a difference. The hard-boiled or noir sleuth can surely get away with worse behavior than a respected one in a traditional mystery. The question of drama comes into play, too. The noir sleuth’s bad behavior is expected, while the other’s isn’t. Some cozy sleuths seem to get away with almost anything as long as it’s funny.

The stakes are important, too. Elizabeth George’s Sergeant Barbara Havers threatened a superior with a gun—when a child’s life hung in the balance. She didn’t get away with this behavior without any repercussions at all, but we didn’t find her turning in her badge and standing in an unemployment line in the next book, either.

Clearly there are a lot of questions I have to ask myself before allowing my sleuth to break the rules, whether it’s her personal ethics or the law of the land:

What are the stakes?
How far out of character is this action?
What consequences—or lack of consequences—can I expect the character to face?
How will the consequences of this action affect the rest of the story?
How will they affect the character’s place in future stories?
How far will readers let me go before they can no longer suspend disbelief?
What rules have I established for the story so far, and how far do I already stretch reality?
What code of ethics does the character usually live by, and how does he justify breaking his own rules?
Do I need to raise the stakes?

This is the aspect of fiction writing that gives me a headache. Maybe I’m too honest. Maybe my character is. Maybe I underestimate the amount of conflict and drama this behavior will provide. Maybe the conflict and drama lie in the internal struggles more than in the actions that follow. Maybe the reader could care less whether a real person in this character’s place would do this, or could get away with it. They just want an entertaining story. Maybe I’m second-guessing myself too much. Maybe I should just sit down and write the thing, and damn the consequences.

The first draft seemed to go great, and I finished it quickly.

It felt a little flat to me. There was a lot more story seeping into my mind, as the original idea developed and morphed over time, than was apparent in that draft. The main problem was the limited viewpoint. After debating with myself for a while, I decided the story needed a second viewpoint character. Actually I have to admit the character himself told me this. Yeah, sounds a little crazy, huh. But this is fiction. He was coming to life, and he wanted a voice.

The character was already there. I just had to make him a viewpoint character, change some scenes that involved him so he could tell a portion of the story from his perspective, reveal some of what he knew.

It sounds so simple.

At first I couldn’t get this guy to come completely to life in my head in quite the way I needed him to, in spite of his nagging desire to do so. I had the idea of him, but not him, if that makes any sense. I had to research the region and slightly different culture he comes from, as well as his profession. I had to understand his childhood and some of the things he went through that motivate him and cause him to keep the secrets he does.

When he finally began to show not just signs of life but a concrete personality, he developed in a hurry, and he started to take over the story. Then I had to work on Iris, because, damn it, this is her series, not his.

That’s where I am now, still adding the punch of this second character’s side of things. I’m almost done. Hopefully the rest of the edits will go much more quickly. Maybe someday I’ll learn to have the whole thing in my head before I start writing. Nah—that’s no fun, knowing where you’re going before you go there? I had enough of that as a technical writer. In the meantime, I’m a bad blogger. I’m in the story, and I want to stay there. Some days I regret that I have to sleep, that’s how caught up I’ve been in my own little world. It sounds pretty sick, if you don’t believe there’s actually going to be a published book that comes out of this.