The Mystery Novel: A Strategy for Living?

Welcome guest blogger Betty Webb. As a journalist, Betty interviewed U.S. presidents, astronauts who walked on the moon, and Nobel Prize-winners, as well as the homeless, the dying, and polygamy runaways. The dark Lena Jones mysteries, based on stories she covered as a reporter, include this year's Desert Wind, given a starred review by Publishers Weekly; Desert Lost ("One of the Top Five Mysteries of 2009," Library Journal); Desert Noir ("A mystery with a social conscience," Publishers Weekly); and Desert Wives, ("Eye-popping," New York Times). Betty’s humorous Gunn Zoo series debuted with the prize-winning The Anteater of Death, followed by the just-as-silly The Koala of Death. A long-time book reviewer at Mystery Scene Magazine, Betty is a member of National Federation of Press Women, Mystery Writers of America, Women Writing the West, and the National Organization of Zoo Keepers.

When I learned that today’s topic was “strategy,” I worried that it was both too specific and too vague. But when I looked the word up in my Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, one of several definitions caught my eye: “A careful plan or method for achieving an end.”

In mystery writing, that end is usually – after the commission of a murder – to restore truth and justice to a threatened community. Yes, someone’s life has been unfairly cut short, but because of the due diligence of our hero sleuth, the guilty person has been apprehended and order has been restored to the world. The sun rises over a peaceful land and birds sing sweet songs as rosy-cheeked children skip hand-in-hand down picturesque country lanes.

If only.

I give a popular writer’s workshop titled “Five Ideas A Day, Every Day,” in which I teach my students how to read a daily newspaper for story ideas. This idea-getting strategy never fails because newspapers are filled with mayhem, from the front page (“Severed head found on popular hiking trail”) to the comics (the anteater in “B.C.” slurps down a peaceful ant farm), to the advice column (“Dear Abby, my husband is having an affair with my mother”). In newsprint, the carnage is never-ending.

But that’s because they reflect real life, a chaotic place where as soon as we solve one problem, another rears its thorny head. We feel like Sisyphus, forever rolling a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down every time.

Compared to real life, a traditional mystery novel is a tidy place. Someone does a Bad Thing, and people get hurt. But unlike in real life, in mysteries the perpetrator of the Bad Thing is always caught and duly punished. Light chases away darkness. Serenity replaces chaos. And it is the strategy of the sleuth that has brought about this magical transformation. Whether a grizzled police detective, a suburban housewife, or even the octogenarian resident of an assisted living home, successful sleuths all have one thing in common: an orderly mind.

In the sleuth’s orderly mind, one and one always make two. Effect – the murder – always follows cause – the motive. Confronted with a dead body, the sleuth mentally backtracks from the scene of the crime to the commission of the crime. Throughout this process, clues are studied, red herrings explored and ignored. Consciously or not, the sleuth firmly believes the Universe is an orderly place, that all he/she needs to do is pinpoint the one disorderly element, and lo presto, the perpetrator is revealed. The innocents are saved, the guilty are punished. The sleuth’s strategy guarantees salvation.

Sounds almost religious, doesn’t it?

Maybe that’s because in a way, a traditional mystery novel is a religious pilgrimage. We begin in Eden, where all is peace and light. Enter the snake. Daylight darkens. Eden vanishes. Someone gets killed. Chaos reigns until one day, someone with an orderly mind shows up with a list of rules that promise peace and light – a strategy for living, if you will. Exhausted by the chaos, most people eagerly adopt the rule book, hoping that by adopting this new strategy, they will win back Eden.

This is exactly what a mystery novel gives us: a formerly happy place marred by an ugly crime, returned to salvation by our mentally-formidable sleuth.

Maybe it bears repeating – strategy guarantees salvation.

At least in traditional mystery novels, it does.

To read the first chapter of Betty Webb’s new mystery, DESERT WIND, log onto www.bettywebb-mystery.com

Strategy: Finding a Balance

by Gigi Pandian

I'm swaying in the wind right now, somewhere in between the extremes of being strategic about publishing decisions and simply having fun with writing mystery stories.

There's a good balance somewhere in there, but finding the perfect personal balance is a bit like standing on the head of a needle. It's far too easy to fall to one side or the other.

One of my New Year's Resolutions was to keep writing fun. My goal of publishing at the present time isn't to strategically optimize sales. Otherwise I probably would have continued on my traditional publishing trajectory that I was on before I received my breast cancer diagnosis, or have come up with a super-strategic self-publishing plan. Instead, one of my biggest 2012 goals was to celebrate the end of my cancer treatments in August with holding my first mystery novel, Artifact, in my hands, and celebrating with good friends.

But...Somewhere along the way of following the steps to publish a good quality end product, I began to think more strategically.

I knew after working with an editor that I should produce Advance Reader Copies four months before the book's release date if I wanted any chance of garnering advance reviews. And I knew that meant also creating ARCs in a specific industry-standard way. Then there's the endless amount of possible publicity....

But hang on a minute! Didn't I decide to do this to have fun? I took this path because I wanted to share the mysterious adventures of treasure-hunting historian Jaya Jones, her magician best friend Sanjay (aka The Hindi Houdini), and all the other characters that won't stop rattling around in my head. I don't want to go online for the purpose of selling books. I want to enjoy interacting with other writers and readers. If I gain some readers, then that's great. But I'm not happy when I'm in the mental space of being overly strategic about my actions. You could probably count the number of times on one hand that I've used a hashtag on Twitter. I don't think like that when I'm chatting on Twitter. Nor do I want to.

But I need to do something, right? Because otherwise I might as well be writing my stories in my little Bay window only for myself. I'm sure I'd still write stories in a journal even if nobody else would ever see them. But that's not what I'm doing. I'm drafting, writing, revising, writing, revising, getting critiqued, attending workshops, writing, revising, getting edited, revising, revising some more, proofreading, laying out the text, proofreading, revising, proofreading....

So yes, I'd like my mysteries to find an audience. And I'd like to make enough money from them to finance my travels to research further books (it's the Jaya Jones Treasure Hunt Mystery Series, after all, each story going from San Francisco to some foreign destination to solve a mystery and track down a treasure).

Therefore I've got a binder of research notes where I'm keeping track of ideas about how to do a good job publishing to find an audience. I'll do the leg work, but then I try not to take myself too seriously.

This week I'm proofreading my ARCs before they go to press. I can't quite convince myself to stop fiddling. I need to step back, take a deep breath, and remember this is amazingly fun. Because it is.

Martha's Life Strategy

Age 3 months: Sleep. Drink. Poop. Repeat.

Age 5 years: Take lots of baths. Learn how to hold breath. Optimize that look of your hair underwater so it is super flowy. All in the pursuit of being a "mermaid princess" (direct quote from my Kindergarten yearbook under "When I grow up I want to be ______). Judge if you want, but this was five years before Ariel made the idea popular.

Age 11 years: Be better than boys. Smarter than boys. Faster than boys. Boys suck.

Age 12 years: ditto

Age 13 years: ditto

Age 14 years: ditto

Age 19 years: Stop living life for my parents. Drop honors chemistry lab - who the hell takes honors chem when they don't want to be a doctor? Start taking classes for the enjoyment.(Note: it still never occurred to me to take a single writing class)

Age 22 years: Work is overrated. Write every free second. Join RWA. Query agents.

Age 23 years: Tuck tail between legs. Acknowledge failure. Focus on people, not personal achievements.

Age 31 years: OMG LIFE DREAMS ARE SO IMPORTANT besides now have a million friends so can take a break from that. Take back up writing. Write write write write write. Write some more.

Age 32 years: Yeah...maybe get in some revision.

Age 34 years: Try new venues. Let go of old expectations.

Age 35 years: ??? I dunno - you tell me. :)

A Writer's Formula

Strategy: A Writer's Formula

by Lisa Hughey

Every writer has a process. A strategy for how to write their book. What's truly fascinating (to me anyway) is that every writer's process is different. I'd bet every single Pen uses a separate and unique method for getting the words down.

For those non-writers in the house, here are the standard writer strategies for drafting a book. For the draft process you've got outliners, seat of the pantsers, and the, ever unable to commit to one way, hybrids.

1. Outliners

This writer will design complicated outlines complete with sub-headings, along with color-coded charts, character interviews, world-building questionnaires. Sometimes their outlines and notes will fill an entire three ring binder before they ever write a word of the book.

2. Pantsers

This writer has a concept or character or theme in mind and just...sits in the chair and starts writing.

3. Hybrids

This writer will have a general outline. Sometimes they will use the story arc of script writing by charting out Acts and Turning Points and the absolutely essential Black Moment. But after they get those key points down, they just sit and write.

So now you're thinking, okay fine, but after the draft is written, all writers use the same revision strategy.

Again, everyone's strategy is unique. Those amazingly right brain writers will graph out where the book goes astray and what needs to be changed in order to get the plot nailed down and coherent. They also tend to revise at the sentence level at the same time, crafting sentences to make their readers weep, or laugh, or sigh.

Other writers will do three or four or ten passes. During each pass through the manuscript, they focus on a separate piece of the whole. They add, delete, and refine the plot, character motiviation, emotion, blocking, and sentence level details until the work is just right.

When they get ready to revise, some writers use spreadsheets, some use post it notes, some hold all those details in their brains.

And yet, at the end of the process, all writers have a finished work. So if you're a writer, embrace your own strategy. And don't worry if that strategy changes from book to book. After all, as people we are a work in process, just like our novels.

Hunker

L.G.C. Smith

Strategy is a very tricky concept in the life of a writer. Well, this writer. Being good at imagining things, I’m not bad at coming up with good strategies in any number of arenas. I attribute this to my father having had such a love of military history and dragging me across the US and the Western Pacific narrating various battle plans complete with commentary on strategic brilliance and failures. From Custer’s failures at the Little Big Horn to why the US used nukes on Japan, I took it all in.

Simultaneously, there were years of strategic analyses of professional sports games from the spectator position, which at my house was cross-legged on the floor in front of a pile of Legos or Lincoln logs. Dad watched, commented, and helped build things. I ended up with a solid understanding of strategy as it relates to winning games and territory. In other endeavors, I understand the importance of strategies, and can formulate then easily.

I do not, however, possess the will to follow through on the strategic planning I so excel at. One thing about strategy: without a certain degree of ambition and motivation behind it, it remains an academic exercise.

Therefore, I’ve developed a general life strategy that doesn’t require a huge amount of action. This is playing to my strengths. And that strategy is: hunkering.

Hunkerers play a long game. You define goals—conservatively, of course—and you find a position from which you think you can achieve them, and then you dig in. It’s not unlike the tortoise’s path in “The Tortoise and the Hare.” You poke your head up periodically to assess the field, and then you hunker back down. You aren’t static. But there aren’t many sudden moves.


Hunkering is not a sexy strategy, I’m sorry to say. It’s not always nimble enough to take advantage of trends or new opportunities. I wouldn’t say I’d advise others to adopt it, but it’s what I’m able to do, and so I work with it.

Every now and then, however, even a world-class hunkerer needs to blow off steam. This week brings a visit from my brother, the tech geek with crazy ass computer skills and sub-par communication skills, along with his wife and three young children, one of whom is autistic, another of whom is not quite two years old, and all of whom still crap their drawers (don’t ask). Anticipating chaos, which is not the hunkerer’s favorite modus operandi, I’ve given myself a strategy to diffuse stress. I’m going to Tweet the horrors.

This is a good strategy for several reasons, not the least of which is that no one else in my family is on Twitter. Then there’s the fact that I have very few followers. I can speak out with low impact, which is perfect for a hunkering life strategy aficionado. And finally, it gives me some more Twitter practice. That can’t hurt. It’s part of my long game.

A Simple Strategy

--Adrienne Miller

Chances are I’m not going down in history as a great strategist. I’m terribly disorganized, both in thought and in action. I have a bad habit of trying to do too many things all at the same time and not finishing any of them. 

But that doesn’t mean I don’t have a strategy when it comes to writing. I do. It’s just a simple one. 

Keep Going

Something doesn’t work, change it. Go down the wrong way, turn around. Fall down, get back up again. It’s simple, but it’s far from easy. When the going gets slow or doubt creeps in it can feel like the hardest thing in the world to get over a bad review, or send out another query, or scribble down just one more word. But you have too. Just one more. Then one more after that. Then another. 

Hard Work Makes Its Own Luck

Luck, good luck especially, always seemed to me to be too fickle to rely on, and I’ve never trusted stories about instant success. How many stories about overnight sensations leave out the decade(s) of practice and work they did before making it big? There are so many things about this business we can’t control. Focus your energy on what you can.

That being said...

Dumb Luck Is Pretty Awesome Too

Every now and again you’ll bumble your way into just the right place at just the right time. When that happens, don’t be afraid to seize the hell out that moment. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it’s awesome.

I Suck at Strategy

I suck at strategic thinking. And when it comes to acting strategically, well...it's a good think I'm lucky, because I'm a total loss at such things.

Like this one time at a conference when I had to go to my publisher's formal cocktail party. I'm standing around with a glass of red wine in my hand, feeling like an awkward idiot because I *know* cocktail parties like these are all about meeting the right people and schmoozing with folks who might be good for your career and selling oneself.

All of which I HATE.

Then I notice someone leaning up against a column, looking kind of weird and out of place --like me! So I approach him, and he turns out to be fascinating, and funny, and geeky, and we get more drinks and proceed to have a grand old time. Then another fellow joins us, who turns out to be the first guy’s assistant, and we start making inappropriate comments and snide remarks and laughing so loudly that my editor’s boss joins us, at which point we rein it in and behave ourselves.

As soon as the two men walk off, my editor’s boss turns to me and says: "Good for you! That’s an important connection to make."

And I say, "Wha…?"

And in response to my vague look she says, "You realize he’s the national buyer for ****" (fill in incredibly important chain of bookstores)

And I say "Wait, wha…?" ... and only then realize I've been saying inappropriate things to someone Very Important.

And then later in the evening I'm all tongue-tied around the fellow because I now know he could be a Strategic Asset.

That’s the kind of suave, strategic player I am. So if I ever approach you at a party, you can be sure I think you're not important.

Wait. That didn't come out right...