By Claire Booth
They’re coming back to haunt me.
All the little things I skipped over while writing my current book. They’re details
I didn’t want to stop for – street names; what kind of guitar an aging country
star would own; what time the sun sets in October in Branson, Missouri.
But now the book is done. I just
need to insert these particulars to have it ready for my first round of
readers. It’s not considered good form to hand someone a manuscript scattered
with sentences like, “and he pulled into INSERT NEIGHBORHOOD NAME HERE, slammed
the car in park and ran toward the house,” or “the kid had been enrolled since
school started INSERT SCHOOL DISTRICT START DATE.”
I do it this way because I don’t
want to stop the actual writing. It’s a good method to keep me cranking away at
the actual plot without getting bogged down in research side trips that add to
the book’s authenticity, but not to the plot itself. Because these side trips take
time. A lot of it. I try for two
verifications of every fact. And if it’s a judgement call between two things,
well, that takes even longer. Who knows how long it will take me to decide on
that country music star’s guitar.
