Not a Good Eye Witness

We live on a small connector road that's only a few miles long, named for the family that built the farm we live on. Our closest neighbors to one end are half a mile away; I've never measured it, but at a guess our closest neighbors in the other direction are as much as 3/4 of a mile from us...  Maybe even a little more.

We know it's normal for hay to be delivered on flatbeds and we know who comes to mow the lawn. We recognize the trucks of farm hands. 

We know what's normal. 

Last Friday morning waa anything but normal. It started with bringing Murph outside around 5:35 am. She has a run line and I clipped her up and started my routine. I went around the side of the house to get the hose to fill the watering can. 

Our cellar doors were open. 

That made me jump. I went to the back of the house to raise the pump and Murph started barking. Across the road from the barn, on our farm field, there was a car. And two people were outside of the car looking across the field. Now, I hadn't heard the car and when I saw it I could tell that it had been turned off but I still initially thought they'd stopped to look at deer or something. I didn't think much of it.

Then they started walking down the road past my house.

Maybe the car had broken down? We must have 54 feet of fencing running along the road in front of our house.  Maybe more. They walked past the house and past the spot where the drainage culvert runs under the road and turned right... walking down our farm field on the far side of the ravine. 

Murph is continuing to go crazy so by 6 almost everyone is awake and in the kitchen. I watch these two guys, who I woukd have guessed as teens, walk down the field, go to one side and then the other and then return with a third person on a piece of equipment, like an ATV with a bucket on the front. 

We live on 500 acres. I couldn't begin to tell you where all the property lines are... all told, there are three houses on different parts of the property.  Neither of them are the closest houses to us. 

I know what's normal around here. Enough to recognize abnormal when it happens and let the property owner know something is amiss. 

This was when I realized that I hadn't taken a very good look at the guys who'd gone down our field. Sure one was taller, with dark curly hair, while the shorter fellow had sandy hair. I could see the tall one's white t-shirt easily across the field. The shorter guy's blueish-green shirt meshed in with the trees in the distance. 

It was easy enough to walk over and take down the car's details but I realized after I texted Bill and heard that nobody was expected and certainly not at 5:45 am that if there was a real problem I'd be giving the most mediocre, general description ever. 

It reminded me of something Anthony Bidulka said years ago when I was at one of his book signings. He said he pays attention to physical details of people around him because it informs his character descriptions. 

Studies have shown that eyewitness testimony is often unreliable. 

The start of my Friday the 13th last week proved that, even as a writer, I wouldn't be much better than anyone else. Part of the reason was that I didn't see the need to pay attention to these guys until they were walking away from me at a great enough distance to not be able to see much that would be useful for identifying them. 

 

Want to play a fun game with yourself? When you meet up with a group of friends, guess everyone's age and height. Then confirm that information. How good are you at telling how old someone is or how tall they are? This is a great thing to do at a meeting of mystery writers. Another thing to do? Have different people come in wearing masks and costumes. See if you can use other physical characteristics to identify who is who. 

Writers, remember if you're writing a mystery that not every potential witness is a good witness... but paying attention to the physical characteristics of the people around you enable you to produce rich descriptive details of the characters in your works.

Also... remember that how a person describes another comes down to perspective. A young child may describe Dad as a giant when he may be average height. Descriptions in writing are about seeing the world through the character's eyes, not your own.

The Ebbs and Flows of Daily Writing

by

Scott D. Parker

I wrote last week about momentum and immediately followed it up with two 3,000-word days for a 6,000-word weekend output. Momentum was moving. Monday was back to a basic grand, but Tuesday was a personal best: over 4,000. And that was a workday. Man, the words were flowing and the story was just chugging along nicely.

So, I thought to myself, if I can keep this up, I can easily have this thing finished in August. True, 4,000 words is a prodigious output for a working guy like me, but I got it done. I went to bed on Tuesday with visions of grandeur.

The Wednesday hit and it was like I was going in slow motion. The. Words. Just. Did. Not. Flow. It was like pulling teeth. For the first time in days, existing books on my bookshelf started to look more interesting than the scene I was writing. The iPad was there...did I have any plays on Scrabble? What’s the latest news on …well, anything? I turned aside all distractions andI managed nearly 2,500 words, but it was a slog. I opted for writing a number of smaller scenes versus one larger one. It enabled me to keep making progress.

More than anything, the Easy Tuesday 4,000/Difficult Wednesday 2,500 was a reminder that each day is a new writing session complete with obstacles to overcome or smooth sailing to ride. Those visions of grandeur was, on Wednesday, turned to delusions. This writing thing can be as easy as or as hard as it wants to be.

The key for me was to keep moving forward. Keep writing. And I kept the words of Joelle’s post from last Sunday in my mind as well, especially her third point: Repeat this phrase—“I will get to THE END.” And frequent commenter, Dana King, also made an incredibly salient point [my italics]: "Woody Allen once said 80% of success is just showing. In writing, that means finishing the book. Writers are often terrible judges of their own work, if only because they are the only person who knows what they wanted the book to be; everyone else takes the book at face value." That is an incredibly obvious point but one that I've missed way too often.

I showed up this week, in the easy times and the not-so-easy times and, by Friday, I was rewarded not only with 17,000 new words on this novel-in-progress, but I have achieved a 9-day streak of writing more than 1,000 words a day. Most importantly, however, is not the streak of 9 but the streak of 47. That is the number of consecutive days I’ve now written. (It’ll be 48 by the time this post goes live.)

I have a paperweight on my growing manuscript that has an inscription by Benjamin Disraeli: The secret of success is constancy to purpose. I’ve had the weight for years and only now, in the summer of 2013, am I really understanding what it means with writing.

The progress continues...

How are y’all doing with your writing projects?

Knocking You Out

By Steve Weddle

I get up from the barstool and walk to the back of the room, past the mirror so that I can describe myself to you, the reader, in a completely natural manner that you totally fall for.

I rub my scalp the way one might palm a basketball, which is my way of telling you that I am bald because basketballs do not have hair. I like to think of my baldness as a choice. It would not be a lie to say that age had caused me to have less hair than I once had, but what of it? The parcel of scalp once reserved for hair had, years ago, given itself over to emptiness. If I were clever I would perhaps say something about my hair deserting me about the time my wife did and provide a little more depth to my character, which should interest you. Instead, I will probably make a joke to you about my hair deserting me, leaving a desert of skin on my head. As you can tell, I am not terribly clever. I could, I suppose, devote a few hours of the afternoon -- what might amount to a parenthetical for you, the reader -- to researching desert people. Bedouins or whatever they are so that I could layer my descriptions like a $100 haircut. But I cannot. I do not have that luxury. For this story, as you have noted, is told in the present tense. Were I in a position to know what will transpire, what will have transpired by the time you are reading this, will have read this, I could luxuriate in cleverness. But as it is, I can only pause here at the mirror for a moment, palm my head to show you that I am bald, and linger for a moment on my face. Let’s do the eyes first.

They’re a rather dullish brown. But I would like for them to be blue. So let’s pretend that they are blue. Also, let’s imagine that I have a scar above my eye. Don’t ask what it is from. I won’t reveal that until a hundred pages in, though I’ll drop hints about some sort of darkness in my past.

-------------

Did you make it this far? Did all the nonsense send you running?

I've been giving some thought to what pulls a reader out of a story. I think it might be different stuff for each of us.

I hate that "look at myself in a passing car window so I can describe myself to you, the reader" stuff. Some folks don't care. Some folks find other stuff pretentious. I don't mind pretentious writing, as long as it doesn't pull me out of the story. 

The self-description stuff is tough, tough, tough to pull off. I'm not sure how you do it in first-person and make it seem real. Maybe you work it into the story so that it means something other than saying what color your hair is. I mean, I get that folks want the reader to have a picture of the character. I just don't know that it matters. Do I care that your main character is 5'10" instead of 6'? I dunno. Does it come up later? Is there A Clue that only a 6'5" person could reach? A half-eaten, top-shelf donut with teeth impressions?

I'm not a big fan of physical descriptions, I guess, unless it matters. So those, especially when they seem forced, pull me out of the story. Do I care that your character is bald? Are you trying to sell action figures? Do I care about your eye color? Should I?

A description of the character that first appears 100 pages after the character appears also bugs me. Um, he has three arms? No, he doesn't.

Forced description pulls me out.

Bogus historical details will kick my lovely bride out of a book. I'm not a fan of any old crap, so I don't have any examples here. But like some Victorian card game in a Regency-period novel. Or a "dance card" 100 years too early.

Poor proofreading will send us both to another book. Even the best books suffer from "it's/its" sometimes.

Awful figurative language. "The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant." or "She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up."

I'm talking about stories that I like, stories I want to read, not terrible stories I don't care about. 

Don't knock me out of your story for something trivial. Please.

What pulls you folks out of stories?