Joyce Simons

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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.

Knitting with 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.

lipstick on a pig

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.

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A Nerd’s Take on Feedback

A few years ago, I decided to change careers. The only problem was that I had no idea which career to pursue next. I tried to think my way to the answer. Whatever I was meant to do in this lifetime must be something that came naturally to me, I reasoned. But I was a little too close to the subject (i.e., me) to be objective. And besides, if you want to know what your passion is, it’s best to feel—not think— your way to the answer.

Glasses with tape

So I turned to my friends. I asked them to list the things they felt I was really good at. I collected their responses, put them in an Excel spreadsheet, and normalized their answers. (For instance, I considered “running” and “jogging” to be essentially the same activity for the purposes of this experiment, though none of my friends listed either activity— or any other sporty activity for that matter). Then I sorted the activities by frequency (how often they appeared).

I was blown away by the unanimity of my friends’ answers. Storytelling topped the list. Drawing relationships between things came second. I had no idea at the time that writing novels about someone who pieces together seemingly unrelated clues would hit the mark.

Crossroads sign

Fast forward to the present day, and I’ve created several spreadsheets to track my progress as a novelist. You might consider it a nerdy way to manage my second career but, as I always say, there’s a lot of comfort to be found in nerdiness. Nerds are reliable. So is data. Try as you might, you cannot argue with data.

One spreadsheet tracks responses from agents I queried. I wish I received more personalized rejections but I understand the time constraints of people who are inundated with query letters and sample chapters. Unfortunately, they offer no meaningful data to explain why I received more “not a great fit” responses than “please send me the full manuscript” (though I’ve received several of the latter— yippee!).

So, in search of meaningful feedback by avid mystery readers, I entered a competition. Several judges read and scored my work, and most of them were kind enough to write comments to substantiate their numerical ratings. Normalizing those comments was a lot trickier than normalizing activities I’m good at. But the end result was just as clear-cut. The writing was “excellent” and “evocative.” What was lacking was “more dialog,” which struck me as ironic because my background is in screenwriting. Other comments confirmed some niggling concerns I had about other aspects of my novel. But, as I wrote earlier, you can’t argue with data. It turns out I wasn’t alone in identifying those areas (which, thankfully, are not plentiful). As one judge wrote, “with just a few small tweaks, you’ll have something really special.” And other judges echoed that sentiment using different-but-similar noun-verb-modifier combinations.

Screenbean judges

In the end, after I recovered from the disappointment of not having won the competition, my experience turned out to be immensely rewarding. I’m not yet ready to go back to my manuscript and tweak it on the advice of a handful of anonymous judges. It’s already in the hands of several literary agents. But when I have an agent and publisher, I’ll happily use this data to inform any revisions that will render my novel more successful. For now, I have already begun using it to draft my next novel. And who knows? Maybe this sequel will be recognized instantly as “something really special” without the spreadsheets to back it up.

Thanks this week go to judges 735, 613, 740, and 724 in the Daphne du Maurier Award competition. Some of your comments made me cringe (because I should have caught those issues myself), and some made me laugh out loud (especially the ones about my protagonist’s peculiarities). But all of them provided valid— and valuable— data that I’m putting to good use!

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Men Who Knit

In the days before #MeToo and Times Up, I used to bristle whenever I heard a sexist remark. For example, a man at my gym once gushed, “You can leg-press over 300 pounds? Not bad for a girl!” Never mind that he bulked up his biceps at the expense of working on his knitting-needle legs. Qualifying a compliment with a little sexist flourish is more than I’m now willing to brush aside.

But sexism works both ways. Men make sexist comments about women, and women make them about men. What has changed for me is that my ability to recognize a remark as sexist has skyrocketed while my ability to ignore it has plummeted. So I practically gave myself a case of whiplash the other day while shaking my head in disbelief over this comment from a female literary agent:

“If your protagonist knits, shouldn’t he be a woman?”

Shepherd knitting

The answer is an unqualified no.

But on second thought, allow me to qualify my no. As I like to say, every interaction is an opportunity to learn something new. So here we go.

If you’ve been watching the Winter Olympics, you may have caught a glimpse of Finnish snowboarding coach Antti Koskinen knitting at the top of the course. He took a break just long enough to give his Finnish snowboarder Roope Tonteri a fist pump and then returned to his knitting. If Mr. Koskinen knits, should he be a woman? I don’t think so. Kudos to him for not just knitting on the slopes, but also for doing it during a globally televised event!

Antti Koskinen knitting

If you think that Mr. Koskinen is a highly evolved 21st century male, then you might be surprised to learn that men have dominated the history of knitting through the ages.

Two thousand years ago, men invented fishing nets by knitting them, and began to wear woven clothes — also by knitting them. Fast forward a millennium, plus or minus a couple centuries, and knitting guilds came into existence — and were populated exclusively by men.

Knitting guild

It wasn’t until the 16th century when a man invented a knitting machine that many men stopped knitting because it was more efficient to produce machine-made textiles. Although in Colonial America, boys who didn’t have access to this knitting machine still knit socks and other sundries. Which is not to say that only male colonists knit. But it is to say that not all colonists must have been women because they knit.

The same goes for knitters during the two World Wars— yes, British and American women knit things (socks, mittens, helmet liners) for soldiers but so did schoolboys. (Read more about “bros and rows” on HuffPost.com.)

Knit Your Bit poster

Today, men who knit may seem like an anomaly, perhaps because we’ve become accustomed to the image of Miss Marple or our own grandmothers knitting shawls and tea cozies. But here’s just a smattering of living celebrity men who knit, according to knitcrate.com:

  • Ashton Kutcher
  • Christopher Walken
  • David Arquette
  • George Lucas
  • Keifer Sutherland
  • Russell Crowe
  • Ryan Gosling

In fact, according to CBS News, “a lot of guys are taking up knitting, especially as the hobby surges in popularity on college campuses, in coffee shops and at the many yarn stores that are sprouting up in cities across the country.”

As the saying goes, everything old is new again. Knitters used to be exclusively men, now they’re predominantly women. But men who knit are on the rise! And I like to think that women as well as men might prefer reading about a seductive Frenchman who has mastered the art of knitting to reading about a Miss Marple clone.

Thanks this week go to the folks at HuffPost, CBS News, and NBC Sports who are giving men who knit their well-earned place in the spotlight. Vive le tricoteur !

Christopher Walken knitting

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We’re All in This Together

This morning I woke up at the crack of dawn and zipped to the Seattle ferry terminal to avoid delays at the start of this busy Labor Day weekend. Crossing Elliott Bay by ferry is a wonderful experience, especially on a beautiful day like today. But once in a while, you encounter someone who doesn’t realize—or just doesn’t care— that, like it or not, we’re all on this journey together.

Washington State Ferry

Like this morning, for instance. By the time I arrived, the Seattle holding area was already reaching capacity. Cars were sitting in the first dozen or so vehicle lanes waiting to board the ferry. New arrivals like me were proceeding to empty lanes waiting to fill up. And then the driver of the little red Kia in front of me decided that, rather than proceed to lane 13 or 14, she’d just pull into lane 3 with her tail sticking out so far that none of the cars behind her could pass her. I was dumbstruck. For a nanosecond, I calculated whether I could pass her without scratching her car or mine. Not a chance. So I beeped at her. She rolled down the window and, with a look of innocence that made me want to nominate her for an Oscar, asked, “What?”

Well, she asked so I told her what. “You’re cutting the line,” I said patiently. No reaction. Then I pointed out that when the ferry worker who monitors the holding area arrived, he’d more than likely ask her to back out and go to the end of the line, which might not fit onto the next ferry. And then an amazing thing happened. Not only did she apologize, back up, and proceed to lane 13 or 14, but so did another car that had cut the line by squeezing its arse into lane 2.

Taking a journey of any kind doesn’t mean we have to share the experience with our fellow travelers. You can sit in your car and I can sit in mine, and we never have to interact. But if I do my part and you do yours, then chances are we’ll both arrive without a scratch. So what does any of this have to do with writing mystery novels?

Quite simply, it’s this: “No man is an island,” as John Donne wrote, even if we’re riding a ferry to one. We’re all “a part of the main.” Next week I’ll be heading to the Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference, where I hope to find a literary agent who will believe in me and my work, and offer to shepherd my novel to the best possible publishing deal. But I’m not planning to sit in my car with the windows rolled up while he or she does this alone. We’ll be in this together. When it comes time to promote and market my novel, I expect to play an active part, even though it’s in my nature to let the experts do their bit while I focus on writing the sequel(s).

To improve my luck when opportunity knocks, I’ve been preparing for this next step in the journey by reading piles of books about marketing your work if you’re an author. My favorite book of this type so far is Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday because he takes an holistic approach to the creative process, positioning your work, marketing it, and building a platform. In it, he writes, “If the first step in the process is coming to terms with the fact that no one is coming to save you—there’s no one to take this thing off your hands and champion it the rest of the way home—then the second is realizing that the person who is going to need to step up is you.”

I’ve completed the fun and agonizing work of getting my manuscript to the point where it’s ready to be submitted to literary agents. Now I’m gearing up for the fun and agonizing work of getting it “the rest of the way home” which, to me, means securing representation and a publishing deal in order to get my book on store shelves, in public and private libraries, on Amazon and other online retailers, and more generally, in the consciousness of the book-buying public.

But it all starts with an appreciation for the fact that I may have started out on this journey by myself but I’m not continuing it alone. It’s something that the lady in the little red Kia might not have considered when she snuck into lane 3, but hopefully she’ll remember it on the ferry ride home.

I can’t wait to meet my fellow travelers at Book Passage next week. So until then, I’d like to thank Ryan Holiday for his wisdom. But most importantly, I’d like to thank someone who I’ve waited to thank since I started this blog: my editor, Diane O’Connell of Write to Sell Your Book. I’ve spent my entire career working with editors, so I know a good one when I see it. And Diane is the best, hands down. I decided to shoot for the stars when I went looking for an editor, and I got my wish. Diane gets me, she gets my work, and she makes it better. Best of all, during our very first conversation when I told her I was looking for a top-notch editor who would be as invested in my success as I am, she made it clear that she wouldn’t have it any other way. Who wouldn’t want a companion like that along for the ride?

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Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks

These days, all my social activities with friends who are parents of school-age kids have been put on hold while they gear up for the new school year. If I had kids, I’d be swinging from the rafters at the thought of having my weekdays (or part of them, anyway) back to myself. And then I thought that I do have kids; they just happen to be of the canine variety. And it got me thinking: is it really impossible to teach old dogs new tricks?

I have one new dog, who’s six years old and highly trainable. No problem with new tricks there. And I have one older dog, who’s twelve and has never been trainable, not even by the best trainer I know. Getting her to sit on command reminds me of the scene in Skyfall when the villain, played by Javier Bardem, bemoans the senselessness of Bond’s refusal to do what he wants and ends by lamenting, “It’s exhausting.” In fact, I often try to mimic his accent when I say the same thing to my “senior” dog.

Javier Bardem in SKYFALL

And then I realized that transitioning to a new career means I have to send myself back to school and be open to new tricks. Luckily for me, I love learning new things. In just the past month, I’ve signed myself up for three new learning experiences:

  • Survival strategies, which combines practical self-defense techniques with tactical handheld weaponry. I do not like guns, though I enjoy target practice. And I loathe knives except to slice, dice, chop, julienne, and otherwise cut food. I’m more of an air horn girl. One blast of that thing should send an intruder careening toward the exit signs. But it’s not a suitable accessory for a small purse. Better to know how to wriggle out of an attacker’s grip and run to safety brandishing pepper spray if need be. It’s something that my protagonist, Maxime Martin, had better know how to do too, sans pepper spray.
  • The University of Washington’s Certificate in Private Investigation. At the recommendation of crime novelist Ingrid Thoft, to whom I’ll forever be grateful for turning me onto this program, I applied for admission and I’ll be sitting in the classroom this fall. I can’t wait to learn how to “uncover the facts and expose the truth,” according to the program description, because Maxime will need this know-how for the sequel to my first novel, A SCANDAL IN NICE.
  • The Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference, which was recommended to me by Hallie Ephron, author of my favorite how-to book, Writing and Selling Your Mystery Novel. This conference starts in a couple of weeks, about the same time that my friends’ kids will be facing their first day of school.

I’ve never been to a writers’ conference, so I don’t know exactly what to expect. And being reasonably new to mystery writing, I had never heard of the Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference. So I googled it and found a blog post by mystery writer Katherine Bolger Hyde. What a find— and what an inspiration! She describes how she struggled for ten years to launch her career as a mystery writer. And then, in the space of about ten months, she applied for a scholarship to this conference, won the scholarship, attended the conference, met literary agent Kimberley Cameron, became her client, and ended up with a two-book deal.

It didn’t take this “old dog” (though I prefer “young pup,” but let’s be real) more than ten minutes to follow the scent to the Book Passage website, sniff out information about the scholarship, send in my submission, think good thoughts, and prepare to wait for a reply.

And last week I got the news: I am the recipient of this year’s William Gordon scholarship! WOOT!!!

So while my friends’ kids gather their school supplies and agonize over what they’ll wear on their first day of school, I’ll be doing the same things. Only I’ll be jetting down to San Francisco to begin my schooling at this four-day conference.

Thanks to William C. Gordon for funding the scholarship, Kathryn Petrocelli at Book Passage for her delightful emails, and Hallie Ephron for her suggestion that I check out this conference. But most of all, thank you to someone I’ve never met or had contact with—Katherine Bolger Hyde—for taking the time to blog about her experience and inspire someone a thousand miles away to follow in her footsteps.

San Francisco, here I come!