Writerly Ways

[cornerofmadness]

They tell you write what you know. Most people nowadays disagree. Write what you're willing to research. I'd like to add, write what you're good at. I admit it. I'm not that strong in writing romances. I'm fine with a romantic subplot but as the main feature...well I dislike most romance tropes so I'm off to an immediate bad start. Not good when one of my writing personas is supposed to be writing romance/erotica. I'm lucky that some publishers like DSP will give you leeway there. You have to love a genre in order to write it well, I would say. I don't love romances. Insta-love doesn't work for me even though I've had to use it in short stories. I hate the alpha male trope. End of story, I don't care what genre it is. So, will I ever write a grand sweeping romance that rockets up the charts like Twilight on steroids? Probably not.

I do love mysteries though (way to pick one of the harder genres to write) but I have to say, I need to stop writing them as short stories. Frankly, I sort of suck at it. I don't know how Ellery Queen et al did it. It's very difficult to lay out red herrings etc when you have less than 15K to do it (usually decidedly less). And yet, time and again I get mystery ideas. Often, I never finish them. It's obvious that they aren't going to work.

I did finish two. One a few years back, Riding with Strangers. Both evil_little_dog and silvrethorn liked it at the time but they both agreed as a mystery it just didn't really work since there were no red herrings or anything. silvrethorn went on to add that making it into a novella would be difficult because in my mind it was 'done.' She was right since it's still lying there languishing terribly.

I just finished my untitled (god help me) Steampunk short story. evil_little_dog said the same thing she did last time. 'I like it. It doesn't work as a mystery though.' And it's 1500 words over limit. I'm going to have to cut character building scenes (insert curse words). I'll fall off my chair if they accept it. I even considered writing a 3K story just to try to get into the anthology (and if I had an idea I might have done). So now I'm in the same predicament. It's 'done' and now I'll have to expand it into a novella. At least it's still fresh in my mind and I could do it more easily.

More of the story. Write what you're good at and I am not good at short story mysteries (even my big bangs in fandom are almost always mysteries).

And now some helpful writing websites.

These are from my friend ES Meeting Your Writing Goals

key story questions

150 writing resources

And from my friend, MKF
platform building


yearly count -

68314 / 125000
(54.65%)

Comments

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

You and I are so very much alike judging by this. I love writing the broken character. I have a million half-finished projects.

I think if I ever do a mystery again it MUST be either a novella or novel where I have time to expand ideas, put in red herrings etc etc.

I've decided I will call it quits at 12, 475 so only 475 over which won't be that much of a big deal. That way I keep most of the character bits and lost a lot of not completely necessary sentences. And when it gets rejected I'll just use the longer version and go from there

[silvrethorn.livejournal.com]

I suspect mystery short stories work best when you're writing about odd little puzzles rather than major crimes. Characterization generally takes a distant back seat to plot in mysteries, so there's very little character development eating up your word count--though some writers can sketch a compelling character in just a few sentences, and I envy them. The odd-puzzle plot doesn't require red herrings, just a tantalizing clue and a curious detective of some sort. Murders with multiple suspects are strictly the stuff of novels. If you go back and look at the Sherlock Holmes stories, a majority of them are peculiar little problems like missing persons, retrieval of damaging letters, and a precious (stolen) jewel turning up in the crop of the great detective's Christmas goose. I guess the moral is, don't get over-ambitious.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

You know, I never thought of it that way but you're entirely right. Hmmm