Writing mysteries & more

February 24, 2020 By Joyce Simons

The Mystery of Phutatorius’s Breeches

The other day my critique partner pointed out that I hadn’t published a blog post in a while. In a few weeks, I’ll be attending a writers conference where I hope to meet similarly aspiring authors as well as literary agents. And if any of them takes the time to follow the link on my business card, I want them to experience a blog that’s as fresh as a just-baked baguette — but nowhere near as crusty. So, to get back in the swing of blogging, I had to pick a new topic to write about.

Thus began my foray into Phutatorius’s breeches.

Let me begin by saying that I took time away from blogging to draft a new novel. Researching a novel is, for me, the fun part. It’s also time-consuming, especially if you find yourself in the zone, experiencing flow, living in kairos, or however you describe the sensation of being so immersed in what you’re doing that time flies. The next step, outlining, requires me to exercise more gray matter. I took a class at Grubstreet on outlining (thank you, Blair Hurley, for the excellent instruction), and mapped my story to the unraveling of the psychopathic mind. Then came the hard part, which is also fun, but which can be a little agonizing too: writing manuscript pages. To ease my way back into blogging, I followed a similar path: research-outline-draft. If I was going to blog about being on hiatus, I needed to research the etymology of that word. Google led me to the Merriam-Webster website where, in blue and white, I found this intriguing factoid:

In the 18^th century, Laurence Sterne used the word humorously in his novel Tristram Shandy, writing of “the hiatus in Phutatorius’s breeches.”
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hiatus

What a gem! So many questions popped into my head at once. Who was Phutatorius? Why couldn’t I remember him after having read Tristram Shandy? Why did Laurence Sterne write about his breeches? Did the word hiatus accurately describe what lay inside them? Imagine the thrill I felt when a little googling later, I learned that the hiatus in Phutatorius’s breeches was the point of entry of a piping hot chestnut. The results of my research were getting weirder by the minute.

Now I don’t want to drag you down the rabbit hole of why Phutatorius was harboring the fruit of the deciduous beech tree inside his pants. Or how he got it out. Or why it was hot before it got there. What I do want to do is share my consternation upon discovering that, contrary to the quote on the Merriam-Webster website, quotations from Tristram Shandy on other websites use the word aperture, not hiatus, in relation to Phutatorius’s breeches.

Which brings us to the mystery du jour, which has nothing to do with the chestnut inside said breeches, and everything to do with how the word aperture came to replace hiatus.

I had to wonder: Did Laurence Sterne really invent the word hiatus? If so, why doesn’t it appear consistently alongside Phutatorius’s breeches? How did it morph into aperture, which (according to Merriam-Webster) was first used in the 15^th century and almost always refers to a lens? By whose hand was one word swapped for the other? An agent? Editor? Publisher? Typesetter? Did someone deem hiatus too new a word to appear in a contemporary novel? Or did someone gaze into a crystal ball all the way to the 20^th century and declare that one day, hiatus would be used almost exclusively to describe a break from activity or a type of hernia? And if that was the case, why not just use the word opening instead?

This hiatus here, aperture there discovery punctured my bubble of hope that I could somehow draw a pithy comparison between a literary classic and my own vacation from blogging. I’ve been on hiatus. Technically, you could say I was suspended in an aperture of time, but that just sounds flowery for no good reason. Though some excellent writers I know have allowed a little purple prose to blossom on the pages of early drafts.

Soon, after I finish the first draft of my new novel and before I plunge into adventures in revision, I’ll be back to blogging more regularly. Think of me as a little chestnut seeking respite from social media. Until then, thank you to my readers for your patience, to Blair Hurley for giving me a kick in the breeches to figure out my story, and to my critique partner for suggesting I bring my hiatus — or aperture — to a close.

November 18, 2018 By Joyce Simons

Exposing Your Roots

Last week I attended my first New England Crime Bake, a conference for crime-fiction writers and readers. Every year it seems that Crime Bake sells out within weeks of registration opening up, and now I understand why. It’s small (about 300 attendees), it has an outstanding lineup of speakers (this year’s guest of honor was the legendary Walter Mosley), and it offers access to well-known literary agents and editors who are there to help writers like me pitch our manuscripts.

As with any new environment, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Sure, there would be people milling about, brandishing canvas bags stamped with the manacled red lobster that is Crime Bake’s logo. There would most likely be more women than men. And I suspected that many of the attendees would be “of a certain age,” as they say in France. But what took me by complete surprise was the sight that greeted me at the opening session. I had chosen a seat at the back of the ballroom to survey the landscape, and spotted a woman who seemed to have sustained a massive head injury. Swaths of black hair were missing from the back of her head. I silently applauded her fortitude for attending this conference following what must have surely been a traumatic incident.

And then she turned her head slightly, and it occurred to me that something didn’t look quite right. I pointed my iPhone camera at her and enlarged the image for a better look. That’s when I realized I wasn’t looking at a head injury; I was looking at a bad dye job. This woman had neglected to color the hair on the back of her head. In “Diamonds are Forever,” James Bond said he didn’t care what color a woman’s hair was as long as the collar and cuffs matched. I might add that it doesn’t matter as long as the front and back match too.

It made me acutely aware of how many people see what’s in front of them (say, in the bathroom mirror), and don’t pay as much attention to what may be lurking behind them. It’s a strangely apt analogy for the job of a crime writer. According to Dan Brown, our job is to control the flow of information to the reader. We get to drop clues in the right places to sustain the reader’s curiosity without giving away the ending. We get to show them what we want them to see, shine a light on things we want them to notice, and distract them from what we want to withhold until later.

Three panelists and a moderator:
David Handler, moderator Hank Phillippi Ryan, Walter Mosley, and Joe Finder
at New England Crime Bake 2018

In each of the novels in my Knitting Detective series, my goal is to marry the uniqueness of the setting with a crime that could only be carried out in that place. It’s a challenge I love because I get to immerse myself in the history, culture, customs, patois, etc. of the French city or region where the story is set. Right now, I’m struggling to piece together the puzzle of how a string of murders maps to a local legend. And my experience at Crime Bake couldn’t be timelier. Not only because we all helped each other move our projects forward, but also because the lady whose photo I snapped reminded me of the importance of sustaining suspense from start to finish, striking the right balance between revealing and concealing information, and resolving the mystery in the most satisfying way possible.

Thanks this week go to my fellow Crime Bake attendees, especially Meg Ruley, Hank Phillippi Ryan, and Paula Munier, who made themselves available to me for specific feedback and advice. As Lifetime Achievement Award Recipient Kate Flora said it best at the end of conference, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” Amen.

October 27, 2018 By Joyce Simons

Place as Character

If you’ve ever watched Sex and the City, then you know that New York City is the series’ fifth lead character, so much so that in one episode Carrie calls it her “boyfriend.” Whether or not you’ve seen or even like the series, it’s an outstanding example of capturing the spirit of a place and making it integral to a story. Could Sex and the City have been as successful if it was set in Chicago? Paris? Hong Kong? I doubt it. Some story lines would not have been possible and others would have been dramatically different, as would the whole gestalt of the series. Just off the top of my head, I remember pivotal scenes set in Yankee Stadium, St. Mark’s Place, Columbus Circle, the New York Public Library, and on the Staten Island Ferry. There are even guided tours of the most iconic locations featured on the show.

I like the idea of the map above. But there’s a big problem with it that only someone who knows NYC would pick up on. As the song goes, “The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down.” That means “downtown” should be at the bottom of the map. Even putting it left would be better than right. I’m all turned around when I look at this map. It makes me think that whoever created it doesn’t know NYC all that well.

It’s a mistake I don’t want to make in my own stories.

I’m currently plotting the origin story of The Knitting Detective series, which reveals how Maxime Martin became an amateur sleuth, and I’m setting it in Brittany. A Scandal in Nice takes place in Nice (obviously) and each subsequent story will be set in a different city or region of France. My goal is to get to know each of those locations as well as I know NYC (where I grew up) and Nice (where I spent many months) in order to do it justice. If my stories inspire readers to travel to those places and discover their wonders, then I’ll have done my job well. There’s no other country I know of that has such a rich variety of history, customs, food, culture, etc. from one city to the next. And this phenomenon is made all the more wondrous when you consider that all of France could fit inside the state of Texas.

The challenge is to create a story that works because it’s set in Brittany. And not just the entire region of Brittany, but a specific departément that embodies its maritime past, rugged coastline, historic sites, plethora of offshore islands (some accessible on foot at low tide), megalithic monuments, and reputation as a land of mystery, myth, and superstition. Add to that the fact that it has its own language (Breton), and there’s a lot of material to leverage.

Just yesterday, I shared the plot I had sketched out with a friend and fellow writer who’s a critique partner. I knew it had many moving parts and was on the complex side. What I didn’t realize was that it had too many parts, too many complexities. So when she advised me to use Brittany as a character, I knew it was back to the drawing board for me! Time to simplify my plot and amp up the complexity of my characters– including the setting. And what a wonderful time of year to immerse myself in a setting as lush as it is spooky. What better place to hide and then reveal a dead body or two?

One way to tap into the spirit of a place is to study its legends. You could say that Brittany has its own share of origin stories. They’re fantastical and eerie, and at least one features the devil himself. When I stumbled upon it, I knew it was the story around which I would weave my own. So while many of you will be celebrating Halloween with parties and trick-or-treaters, I’ll be doing copious amounts of research that I love doing to create a convincing backdrop— and foreground— for an old-fashioned murder mystery.

Wish me luck! Maybe one day people will line up to follow a Knitting Detective itinerary through France.

Thanks this week go to two new friends and fellow writers: Megan my critique partner and Corinne my Bretonne language exchange partner, who introduced me to l’Ankou, the personification of death in Breton mythology. I can’t wait to hear what they think of my next plot outline— and to plan my visit to Brittany to make sure it’s authentic!

August 24, 2018 By Joyce Simons

Slow Food for Thought

At any point in time, I have a stack of books piled up around my home and waiting to be read. It’s quite the hodgepodge of genres and topics. And I never choose just one. I give into “shiny object syndrome” and start reading about whatever topic grabs my attention in the moment. Right now, for instance, I’m reading four books: a primer on game theory; SLOW KNITTING by Hannah Thiessen; a novel that a friend just sold to a publisher in an enviable book deal; and a bestselling thriller.

Now you might think that only the last two books would have something in common. But, as odd is it may sound, trust and trustworthiness are integral to the first three.

Game theory isn’t about playing games; it’s about what it means to solve a game, how people signal trustworthiness, and the idea that everyone acts in his own best interest (the same idea made popular by John Nash). If you liked the movie A BEAUTIFUL MIND, you might consider reading up on game theory.

I discovered SLOW KNITTING when I was e-shopping on a high-end home furnishings website. I stopped to wonder why a site like that was selling this book, so I checked it out of my local library. Within minutes of opening it, I decided to buy my own copy. It’s a beautiful book about the craft of knitting. And I don’t use that term lightly. Craft is more than the manufacture of a thing; it is the purposeful application of an artistic skill to create that thing. The table of contents alone communicates the degree of craftmanship that Ms. Thiessen applies to her subject matter: source carefully, produce thoughtfully, think environmentally, experiment fearlessly, explore openly. They’re actions you could apply to many areas of a life lived with purpose.

Which brings me to the third and fourth books on my nightstand. A friend is letting me read the manuscript for the literary mystery her agent just sold to a prestigious publisher. I had been reading thrillers and mystery series the same way I might eat to the bottom of a bucket of popcorn: a little mindlessly and with no expectation of nutritional value. But the epigraph alone told me what to expect: this book was going to be no bucket of popcorn. It was going to be a slow food meal, created with great care and craftsmanship. The opening paragraphs confirmed that belief. I was stunned by the quality of the writing. Even if I didn’t know where the story was going to take me, I realized very quickly that I trusted this writer—not because I knew her personally, or because a lot of publishers wanted to buy her book, but because it was meticulously crafted.

I quickly abandoned the fourth book I was reading because it felt like fast food in comparison. And I decided, after having watched a few episodes of The Real Housewives of NYC back-to-back, to give my brain a nutritious treat.

Anything created with a lot of care, whether it’s something to eat, play, read, or wear, deserves to be sensed to its fullest, and doing that takes time. So, as I head into the next round of revisions of my own novel, hoping to make it something that readers will one day want to own and not just borrow and then toss aside, I’ll leave you with the opening paragraphs of my all-time favorite novel so you can see just what I mean:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.

Thanks this week go to the late, great Vladimir Nabokov, whose words fill me with wonder each time I read them. I’ve bought more copies of LOLITA than I can remember because each time I loan one to a friend, I never get it back. Ah well. At least I can console myself knowing that I gave him or her something nutritious to feast upon.

July 1, 2018 By Joyce Simons

Art and the Rewrite

A few weeks ago, I received feedback on my novel from from several readers, including one high-powered literary agent. And after taking the time to weigh and synthesize their feedback, I decided to tweak my novel for two reasons. First, I want it to reflect my best work. And second, I want to make it as easy as possible for an agent to sell.

But now that I’m deep in the tweaks, they’re taking longer than I expected. The process reminds me of what it’s like to knit something intricate, and discover after a few rows— or worse, a few feet— that you made a mistake. There’s nothing quite as agonizing as pulling out row upon row of knitting. I once spent an entire afternoon unraveling and reknitting a pattern only to discover than I had missed an even earlier mistake.

The challenge with rewriting a mystery is that it’s quite the little tapestry. You have to plant clues without calling attention to them, and introduce red herrings without making it obvious that you’re trying to send your reader down the garden path. It’s sort of like baking a cake only to realize you left out an egg. I wouldn’t know how to fix that cake. But tweaking my novel is feeling a lot like baking a soufflé because it’s one delicate operation.

The good news is that we’re talking about tweaks, not major surgery, because I took the time to get my plot (mostly) right. If I hadn’t, I’d be reliving a tough lesson I learned when I was about 16. I was taking a life drawing class at the Brooklyn Museum of Art with my friend Suzy. I never thought of either Suzy or myself as artists. But she was a dancer, so she had a deeper understanding of the human body than I did. Our instructor, Chuck (his name is still seared into my memory because I had a painful lesson to learn), had us do a five-minute sketch of a young woman. I drew an outline but something didn’t feel quite right. So I used every artistic technique I knew at the time to improve it. When I glanced over at Suzy’s sketch, it seemed overly simple. Poor Suzy. I hoped she could stand up to Chuck’s critique.

Thankfully, Chuck told us not to sign our drawings. We pinned them all up on a wall and one by one, he pointed out everything that was wrong with them. When he got to Suzy’s, I braced myself. I didn’t want to see her decimated right there on the spot. He said something along the lines of, “The torso is a bit too long, but that’s alright. This artist is off to a decent start.”

Phew! Crisis averted! Bullet dodged!

When he got to mine, I tried to act as cool as a cucumber. I didn’t want to incur the jealousy of my classmates for my impressive execution of chiaroscuro. I hoped Chuck wouldn’t lay on the praise too thickly, though I secretly wished he would gush just a little. Here’s what he said:

“I feel really bad for whoever drew this.”

Wait, what?!

“This artist drew a torso that’s much too short and they tried to cover it up with all this fancy shading. The only thing they can do is start over.”

OMG. Talk about wishing a hole would open up in the floor and swallow me. Right then and there, I learned the hazards of putting lipstick on a pig. And I’ve been a little paranoid about repeating that mistake ever since.

The funny thing is that if you didn’t learn a lesson completely the first time, it’ll resurface in a new guise. A few years ago, I wrote a screenplay that wasn’t quite working but I couldn’t put my finger on why. So I showed it to my friend Brian McDonald, one of the best teachers I’ve ever studied with. Brian is a passionate proponent of getting your armature right because it will dictate and support every dramatic choice we as writers make. I remember sitting next to him on a park bench in Capitol Hill as he read my script. I think I even whipped out a pad and pen to take notes. But I could have fit his assessment inside a fortune cookie:

“You have the wrong theme.”

Good grief. There it was: the answer to the mystery. I changed the theme, wrote another few drafts of the screenplay, and reached the quarterfinals of the Academy Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting (a career milestone for new or even experienced screenwriters).

Thankfully, I did due diligence on my novel’s armature and outline before drafting pages. I didn’t get it 100% right but I certainly don’t have to start completely over. So back I go to the proverbial drawing board to unravel some of the tapestry I wove and put it back together in a way that’s just as beautiful but more solid.

Thanks this week go to Chuck for teaching me a hard-learned lesson. I have no idea what became of him or whether he was a successful artist in his own right. But thanks to what he taught me, I plan to persevere in my rewrite without chiaroscuro, without lipstick, and with just enough paranoia to make sure my theme supports my plot, my plot supports my story, and my readers are thrilled with the result.