Author: Elizabeth Spann Craig

The other night I was sleeping and I pulled a muscle in my back.

“*&$#@!!!”
“What’s wrong?” asks my husband, alarmed at the 3:00 a.m. cursing.

“I pulled something!”
“How?”
“I think I rolled over funny.” Then I was awake. I pulled something. While I was sleeping. How completely ridiculous. I’d never done such a thing in my 20s or early 30s. Bleh.

I have two protagonists for two different series for two different publishers. They’re both elderly.

Myrtle Clover for Midnight Ink is an octogenarian. Lulu Taylor for Penguin is in her sixties.

The challenge is to accept the limitations that age can provide, make the story realistic, and still have them both actively engaged in crime fighting.

I’ll admit I have some pretty amazing older ladies in my family. My great aunt was water skiing in her 60s and my grandmother was very active in her 90s. Both of my children’s grandmothers go to the gym for workouts every day. My life has been populated by strong women who say what’s on their mind and are clear matriarchs that everyone respected and listened to.

Myrtle is unhappy when she’s talked down to as if she were a child. In fact, Myrtle might actually take revenge if you did such a foolish thing. It wouldn’t be pretty.

Myrtle isn’t above using her age to her advantage. You might think she was a completely innocuous old lady and lower your guard around her.

That would be a mistake.

What would be a problem for my protagonists? If they took a spill. They really don’t need to fall down. I try to take good care of them and for their part, they’re sharp as tacks and in great shape. They’re not afraid of much. They’re feisty and spirited and ready to take on any villain you send their way.

But still I have people asking me questions. One elderly man demanded in a workshop, “I want to know what ‘old’ is to you.”

I was quick to answer, “Old is a state of mind.” And I truly believe that. He felt that my protagonists would be more limited, physically, in real life. I disagreed.

Although the entire day when I walked around with the pulled Latissimus dorsi, I was reminded that 40 is just around the corner. I wasn’t exactly doing jumping jacks that day. In fact, I was downright cranky.

There’s a new term for the burgeoning genre marked by older protagonists—geezer lit. I think Myrtle and Lulu would find that term belittling.

What if your characters are really young? Are they taken as seriously? Are there limitations based on reasoning skills? What if they aren’t old enough to drive? What kind of independence do they have? There’s a reason why there are so many orphaned child protagonists out there: grownups are lousy at letting children do what they want to do. If you do have parents in a juvenile lit or YA book, are the parents really lenient? How do you handle the problem?

What age are your characters? Do they have age-related challenges?

It’s my Sunday to host a guest at the Mystery Lovers’ Kitchen. Hope you’ll pop over and visit with Midnight Ink author Sue Ann Jaffarian. She writes the Odelia Grey mystery series and the Granny Apples Mysteries.

I’ll admit that I’m not one of those people who does a great job with social cues. In fact, I frequently don’t know what to make of exchanges I have with other people. Are they trying to tell me something? Are they hinting at anything? I’m one of those people that you just have to come out with a sledgehammer and hit me over the head with it. I am not going to pick up on your hints. Do you want your child to be worked into the drama carpool? Do you wish I’d stop talking about writing during lunch? Did I make you mad because I forgot to ask how your weekend trip went? You should tell me.

I was with two other moms at my daughter’s book club meeting a few days ago. Their daughters are also in the Brownie troop that I co-lead (yes, I’m overextended. Bleh.)

We were supposed to have an investiture ceremony for the girls and the facility wasn’t available that day of the week. The other leader suggested an alternate date—the one night I wasn’t available because of a meeting. Unfortunately, it meant we had to restructure the event to make it less fun for the girls….the potluck part of the evening wasn’t going to happen, but we could have cake.

So we’re talking during the book club and one mom says to the other, “We could have had the investiture on the 12th, but Elizabeth couldn’t do it. She has this busy schedule now that she’s got two book series, you know. Always making these author appearances.”

Hmm.

Since I’m clueless about social cues, but I like to do a Good Job (at Brownie leading, too), I tried to dissect this later. Was she being mean? Was there a roll of the eyes? A slight smirk? Was there anything in her tone to suggest she thought I was being difficult? Or a diva? Am I not doing a Good Job?

Was she simply explaining the situation to the other mom? Why the date wouldn’t work?

Was she poking fun at me?

Was she trying to laugh with me? In which case it didn’t work since I was frowned in confusion at her before I changed the subject.

Then I just gave up analyzing it from a personal standpoint since I was never going to figure it out anyway. And thought about it from a writing standpoint. As I write more and more, I’m becoming even more of a fan of subtlety. I think it’s tough to do with 75,000 words, but I’m trying.

The scene above….it could be played out so many different ways. What is the person’s motivation? Their background? Are they normally snide? What about the person they’re addressing? Are they sensitive? Or clueless like me?

Leaving the reader wondering might be good, too. Or you could have different people have different reactions and assessments of the conversation. That’s only natural since different people bring different experiences to the table when they’re reading a situation.

You can change the syntax to bring a different slant to an important scene. Just by choosing slightly different wording, you can change the entire tone of an exchange. It can go from innocent to menacing.

You can show reactions of other characters through speech or demeanor.

You can show the facial expressions or physical actions of the person talking—are they agitated? Are they too calm? Does their voice have an edge to it? Are they blissfully unaware of the reaction they’re producing?

I love the idea of creating little mysteries about people and their motivations in a scene. Because….do we ever really figure people out? And—for the writers out there—do we really want to? Viva la uncertainty!

It seems that, through the course of the years, my sense of humor has gotten dryer. Or something.

I was at the coffee shop for my caffeine fix and saw that the drip of the day was Mexican.

“Will it give me heartburn?” I asked the barista with what I thought was a hint of a smile.

He looked pityingly at me. “No ma’am.” (Yes, he was much younger than me.) “It’s just a type of coffee bean. There’s nothing spicy in there.”

How deflating.

As I writer, I don’t want a reader not to ‘get it.’ I don’t want them wondering, like the barista, if I’m trying to be funny or not.

But I love using humor in my writing:

My books have a lot of situational humor. It’s fun to put a character in an uncomfortable situation and see what happens. My character, Myrtle, gave a disastrous dinner party and she was so serious about trying to make everything perfect. When it all backfired on her, it made the scene funny.

Running jokes—I use small gags that pop up at various points during the story. Humorous subplots are fun to write.

Dialogue—Funny exchanges between characters are a great way to make the characters’ conversations zip by and add comic relief to the story.

What hasn’t worked for me:

I’ve used puns before. One editor wasn’t a fan and took them out.

Winks to other English lit lovers. I thought it would be funny to name the minister in my Myrtle Clover series ‘Nathaniel Dimsdale.’ You know—Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter with the minster, Dimsdale? My editor didn’t think it was funny or interesting. I changed the name.

Humor is such a personal thing. I don’t put straightforward jokes in there. I gravitate to funny or unusual or uncomfortable situations and a small amount of physical humor.

How do you incorporate humor in your books? Do you ever worry your readers won’t get it?

Unfortunately, my son’s technology teacher got very frustrated with his 7th grade class Monday.

One of the students hadn’t followed directions and printed out 8 sheets on the computer printer instead of the 2 that the teacher instructed.

The teachers are allotted a certain number of paper reams per quarter. The student who didn’t listen understandably upset the teacher.

To my irritation, though, he punished the whole class. It was probably one of those “straw that broke the camel’s back” things. I’ve met this teacher and thought him a pretty nice guy.

To add to my irritation, his punishment was for the class to write.

Wonderful. Great way to foster a love of writing in the next generation. It couldn’t be math problems instead? (Now I’m risking upsetting the math types here….but there are only 2 math lovers that I’m aware of who read this blog.)

My son came home in a really frustrated mood and told me he had to write a five page essay on three computer-related questions.

The questions? They could be answered in ten or fewer words—they were basically vocab terms for Microsoft’s Excel software program.

“I’ll never be able to get five pages from these questions!” He was swamped with other work….he’s in honors courses….and didn’t really have the time to suddenly write an essay for an elective course.

“Well…..you can. It’s completely possible. It won’t be good writing, but this isn’t Language Arts,” I said.

“How?”

“Picture the most boring person you’ve ever known. Think of a topic that’s dear to their hearts. Envision them blabbing on and on and on about their love for this thing while you’re desperate to get away from them. That’s the kind of writing you’ll need to do.”

The beginning: I recommended he start off with a couple of paragraphs about Excel itself and why it’s important. And list allll the people who find Excel useful: accountants, students, stock brokers, etc. Then list all the ways they could find it useful.

The middle: I recommended he define the vocabulary word. And then elaborate on why the item in question is a useful feature in Excel. Give several examples that don’t cover new ground but reinforce the feature’s benefits. Do the same with the two other questions.

The end: Wrap it up with a drawn-out closing, overstating the obvious. Repeat some of the same points in the summation.

There would be no subtlety in this essay. He would be spelling it all out, word by word. He would pretend that the person reading it had never heard of the Excel spreadsheet program—or, possibly, a computer– and would explain, in dreadful detail, all the different ways that different types of people could benefit from using this software and these particular features of it.

I read it after he wrote it. It was gosh-awful, which is exactly what it needed to be, under the circumstances. It’s probably an A paper, despite its intrinsic hideousness. I’m so glad I’m not this teacher, reading a total of 150 pages of that drivel from this one class.

The odd thing I found is that my son was elated. He hadn’t realized it was even possible to elaborate to that extent on a topic. I hastened to tell him never to do it with a Language Arts essay.

If I were editing that bloated monstrosity?

He used approximately 1250 words to explain something that easily could be stated in 100 or fewer words. I’d have slashed most of the text as unnecessary.

The beginning was unwieldy and verbose. It dragged on and on. It didn’t zone in to a tight focus on the subject (these few features of the software) but prattled on about the big picture (the entire spreadsheet program and its benefits.) In a murder mystery, this would be the equivalent of talking about the importance of the justice system instead of focusing on a soon-to-be occurring crime.

He assumed his reader had no experience with his subject matter (the only way to squeeze out a big word count was to over-explain.) Yet he knew the paper was going to a technology teacher. We know our audience and need to make sure we don’t talk down to them or over-explain.

He used an information dump on a topic, categorically listing aspects of the program that could be useful. In a normal paper or manuscript, there’s no need to overstate descriptions or to sum up. If you’ve described Tina as a nerd, then you don’t need to keep expounding on this a few lines down: , “Tina loved to read.” “Anytime Nova was on, Tina watched it.” “The highlight of Tina’s day was when she got to watch ‘Star Trek.’” Okay, everyone got the point at the very beginning when you succinctly stated that Tina was a nerd. The rest is overstating the point, unless the reader needs to know about Tina’s ‘Star Trek’ love as an important plot point. No need to belabor it.

The ending was no quick summation of points covered. No, it was this grueling step by step review through the material. I like endings to tie into the beginning, but to offer some fresh insight…after all, a journey should have occurred through the book. Rehashed endings can be painful to read through.

It was ghastly. But I think it taught him more about writing than penning a good paper would have. He had to think about all the standards of good writing—really think about them. And then deliberately disregard them all. It ended up being a useful exercise.

Have you ever read something that made you wonder how it got published? Did you think of ways you could have written it better yourself? Has that provided you with any inspiration for your own writing?

And…it’s pumpkin lasagna, y’all, at the Mystery Lovers’ Kitchen! Now, don’t make that face until you see what’s in it. I promise it’s sweet…and it doesn’t have any tomatoes in it.

My daughter and I were riding down the road in the car and she was chattering about one of her favorite subjects—birthdays and birth places. She’s very impressed with herself that she was born in a Charlotte, North Carolina, hospital since the rest of the family was born elsewhere.

“You were born in South Carolina,” she said. “In Anderson.”

“Actually, no. I was born in Fort Benning, Georgia.”

There was a look of great surprise on her face. “At a fort? Why?”

“Well, honey, there was a war going on—Vietnam. And Papa was in the Army.”

“Papa was in the Army?!?!?!” I can’t really overemphasize her statement, despite the ridiculous number of exclamation and question marks I just used. “What was he doing in the Army?”

“He was a lieutenant. He taught people how to shoot guns.” Big guns.

“Papa?”

It was a shock. She knows her Papa as a mild-mannered English professor in his early 60s. He writes extremely well, edits well, and makes astute analyses on English literature. To her, he was not some gun-toting, camo-wearing soldier during the Vietnam era.

We all have these different facets to ourselves. We wear lots of different hats. And in the past we’ve been different things—I’ve worked in a bank before. I didn’t like it, but it’s part of who I am. An unhappy part. :)

I try to show my characters as people with different facets to them, too. If you’ve got a sleuth who is just a crime fighter, then the reader gets a one dimensional impression of your protagonist.

All these little bits of our past contribute—in good and bad ways—to the person we are now.

Introducing the past can be done casually in a book, without dumping a lot of backstory. My protagonist, Myrtle Clover, is introduced as a retired English teacher. The reader isn’t surprised when she tries to force her book club to ditch chick lit. My protagonist Lulu Taylor, was raised by her aunt and spent her childhood at her aunt’s barbeque restaurant. Now she treasures her family and that restaurant over anything—and is prepared to protect them when some become murder suspects.

With a little bit of set-up, we can take our characters in different directions, and show a different side to them.

And, on a separate note, I’d like to offer a sincere thanks to all veterans as those of us in the States observe Veterans Day.