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I’m sure that my 14 year old son would like to correct anyone who thinks it’s cool to have a writer for a mom. :)

I was reading through his research paper before he turned it in yesterday. I thought he did an overall great job on it, but there was one thing that grated on me. I tried to mention all the good things first.

“Great job putting the info in your own words!” I said. “You’ve got some really solid paragraphs, too—nice topic sentences and supporting details. And those footnotes! Wow!” I hesitated.

“Okay. So what’s wrong with it?” he asked. He’s a cutting-to the-chase kind of kid.

“It’s choppy. There really aren’t any transitions between your thoughts. You’re presenting the info, but it’s not connected. It’s just sort of jarring.”

Maybe it’s not the biggest problem for a research paper, but poor transitioning sure does make for a bumpy read in a novel. It’s not fun to be confused or to wonder what’s going on when I’m reading a book. Or to be bored by a transition that’s too long or not necessary.

Transitions (or lack of them) that pull me out of a story:

Rambling transitions that call attention to themselves (I’ll admit that this is an issue that might be just something that bothers me): The summer’s heat finally gave way to fall’s gentler temperatures. Trees shed their leaves and children packed their bookbags and headed back to class…blah, blah, blahhhhh.

Transitions that are too detailed and follow a character too closely (even when they’re being boring): Clara walked to the door. She opened it and strolled out to her car, thinking about what she’d just heard from her mother. She turned the key in the ignition and slowly backed out of her driveway, checking her mirror. She decided she would go to the grocery store and pick up a gallon of ice cream. At this point I’m really just thinking how boring Clara is and how much I want to escape her company. We could easily have Clara just show up at the store, if that’s where we need to have her: Clara searched the store’s freezer for her favorite flavor of ice cream. “Why haven’t you returned my phone calls, Clara?” asked a grim voice behind her…

Transitions that are too spaced out with no explanation: Two years later, John decided to finally apply for law school. Whaaa? Two years later is fine, but can we get a little hint as to what John was doing? After two years of working construction during the day and delivering pizzas at night, John decided that he’d give law school a try.

No transitions at all…just a jump from one thought to another with total disconnect. And I’m actually having a hard time writing this without transitions because I think it’s pretty difficult to leave them out! John and Clara engaged in desultory conversation at the punch bowl. Clara asked Tina about the Biology homework. Jim asked Clara whether she was going to the soccer game the next day. Bleh. It just feels like these characters are being tossed in there with no set up at all. A simple John and Clara joined Tina and Jim at the punch bowl would have easily set up any future conversation between these people with no choppiness.

Novels need tons of transitions. We need transitions between scenes and between chapters. Even paragraphs need transitions. To me, the more subtle they are, the better. And if we can transport our characters efficiently to their marks onstage, then we’re making our story more exciting in the process.

Interested in more posts on smooth transitions? Here are some of the most popular articles in the Writer’s Knowledge Base on the topic:

Are Your Characters Falling Through Gaps in Your Writing? (Plot to Punctuation)

Transitions: Linking Forward Through the Story (Talk to You Universe)

More on Transitions (Terry’s Place)

How to Work With the 4 Levels of Transition in a Book (How to Plan, Write, and Develop a Book)

Transitions (Janice Hardy’s blog)

Do transitions trip you up, too? (Yes, my son fixed his…I think he could see how much they were bothering me!)

I went out last weekend with my husband, sister and brother-in-law for dinner and to watch the musical “Avenue Q.”

It was a really funny play—sort of a risqué puppet show. As silly as it was, I noticed that it had an underlying theme to it—the search for one’s purpose in life. Actually, this theme wasn’t underlying at all—they put “Purpose” up on two big screens in a Sesame-Street-esque video to draw attention to it and poke a little fun at it.

The fact that a musical puppet show could bring up theme in such a huge way made me think about the element in my own books.

Theme isn’t something I’ve thought about or deliberately planned into my books. But genre fiction has themes, too. I write traditional mysteries, so the big picture idea of my books is good vs. evil set in the form of a puzzle.

Not only that, but I do have underlying themes that I seem to come back to over and over and in different series. Did I mean to do this? Actually, no. Apparently, theme can act like the songs that get stuck in our head all day—we just keep repeating them over and over until our brain makes sense of them.

Do our characters have common problems that they encounter or work to address? My protagonists usually live alone (and enjoy it…usually) and encounter intergenerational stresses. They experience the changing roles and role-reversals that come with age. Neither of these things applies to me, but I’m apparently interested in these topics and see a lot of people dealing with them.

Theme doesn’t have to be on an epic or literary scale. Have you noticed a certain repetition of ideas or problems in your books? Even small ones? Do your characters have the same types of transformations? If so, this might point to an underlying theme in your books. It really can be just an idea we’re exploring…sometimes for more than one book. Heck, sometimes for more than one series.

Theme has an impact on our characters, too, and can make them have more layers. It can affect their view of the world and how they handle different types of conflict. It can provide internal conflict, too. It helps them come alive as they complete a character arc. Because the characters are exploring the themes on the page.

Need help finding your theme or developing one? There was a nice post some time back on the Yingle Yangle blog that featured some helpful questions to ask yourself. Janice Hardy has a nice post on developing theme. And Larry Brooks has a post called Finding – and Leading With — Theme on his StoryFix blog.

As a reader, do you spot theme quickly? Is it something you think about as you write?

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And…thanks so much to the folks at Writer’s Digest for choosing Mystery Writing is Murder as one of their Top 101 Best Sites for Writers for 2011. :) It’s truly an honor.

Some writers I know bask in the writing process, savoring the time spent crafting a novel as the seconds turn into minutes turn into weeks (and months…and years). For them, writing is a drawn-out love affair.

I’m not one of those people. When I have an idea, I want to get it written as quickly as possible. Why? Because I’ve got a ton of other ideas, lining up on my brain’s tarmac waiting to take flight.

Here are some tips for writing your first drafts (note: first drafts) as quickly as possible.

Give yourself permission to stink. (Put your head out the window and take a deep breath. That odor you smell? I just started a new project.) Don’t worry so much about your grammar and sentence construction. Don’t try to describe your setting to the finest detail. Dialogue a bit wooden? Don’t fret about it now. All these boo-boos can be fixed during the revision process. Why waste time perfecting a certain passage when it might end up on the discard heap?

Don’t revise as you go along. Start writing and don’t look back. Plow ahead. Odds are, when you finish your draft, there will be tons of stuff (tons!) you’ll have to change anyway. Decide to change a character’s name? Fine. Highlight the new name and keep on trucking. You can go back and clean things up when you’re finished with the draft. Why waste time and effort?

Set a quota and stick to it. Use either the “words-per-day” method or set aside a certain amount of time every day to write. Don’t get up from your desk (or bench or bed or hammock or wherever you write) until you’ve satisfied your quota. It’s that easy (insert diabolical laugh here). To get even more done, “fiddle” with your quotas. For instance, you could start out the week with a thousand word daily quota, then increase it by 200 words per day throughout the week. Or you could pick one day a week to “double-dip,” where you write twice your daily quota.

Research? You don’t need so much stinkin’ research! Do only the barest of bare minimums of research. Some writers I know use “doing research” as a procrastination device (I know, can you believe it?). If you come upon something you don’t know—a fact, a name, the capital of Justrevoltedstan—just type XXX and keep on writing. You can go back and fill it in during the revision stage. Again, why waste time researching something that might not even make it into the final draft?

Stay away from that durn Internet and other shiny, distracting things. As my blog host Elizabeth recommends, set a timer for checking email and blogs and Facebook and Twitter. Then, when it goes off, your break is over and it’s time to get back to…ding!

Hey, gotta run!

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The first book in Alan Orloff’s Last Laff Mystery series, KILLER ROUTINE, is now available, at your favorite booksellers and on-line. His debut mystery, DIAMONDS FOR THE DEAD, came out last April and was nominated for the Best First Novel Agatha Award. For more information about Alan and his books, please visit www.alanorloff.com

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Thanks for inviting me to your blog today, Elizabeth! I always enjoy my visits here (You have such nice blog readers!)

Thanks for coming by, Alan! Congratulations on your Agatha nomination and your new release!

Now that I’ve brought up a drawback to the Kindle (which I believe will be quickly ironed out in future generations of the product), I thought I’d write a little on one unexpected benefit I’ve enjoyed with the Kindle…squeezing in extra revision time.

In the past, my revisions have mostly been done at a planned time and place—not spontaneously at all. I write on the go in little unexpected pockets of extra time, but haven’t really been able to edit that way.

Instead, I’ve just taken my laptop and headed off to the library or coffee shop. There are definite drawbacks to revising on paper—one is the transcription process from paper to computer if I get too far ahead. Besides, it’s a pain lugging around a 2-inch pile of paper in the off-chance that I can catch a few minutes to edit or revise.

The Kindle does make it easier to edit on the go.

I’ve just saved my Word docs as text files (.txt) to make things easier. (You can do that when you click ‘save as’ when you save a file, or you can just copy/paste the document onto NotePad.) You could also save them as PDFs, but the PDFs are like photos on the Kindle—and you can’t make the font any bigger (and small type is starting to be a problem for me.)

There are a couple of ways to upload a file to your Kindle (my directions will be for PCs). The free way is to connect your Kindle to your computer using the charger you got with your device (the plug part of the cord comes off and you’ll have a USB connection underneath.) Plug one end of the cord into your Kindle, the other into your computer USB port.

When your computer recognizes your Kindle, go to Start/Computer. You’ll see “Devices with removable storage.” And your Kindle will be there. Click on the Kindle icon and open the documents folder. This is the destination for your manuscript file.

Go to your Documents library and select the file you want. Drag the file to the Kindle (on my computer, I can see the Kindle listed in a column to the left of the Documents library.) Drop it in the Documents folder for the Kindle. Disconnect your Kindle from your PC, hit home on your Kindle device, and you’ll see your file.

Or…you could email it to your Kindle. The cost, I believe, is now 15 or 25 cents to do so. Your Kindle has an email address—you can find it on the Manage Your Kindle page when you pull up your Amazon account on your computer. It’s a @kindle.com address.

Editing on the Kindle is best for a global read of your manuscript for content problems and less for doing line editing. You can make notes on your Kindle for changes you’d like to make to the document. All the notes that you make on your manuscript can be transferred to your computer. You’ll just attach your USB cable again, go to My Computer, find your Kindle device, look in the documents folder, and you’ll see a My Clippings folder. Your notes will be in there and you can just copy the file to your computer.

Does it sound complicated? It’s actually more intuitive than I’ve made it sound. It certainly does beat lugging around a huge manuscript with me everywhere. :)

How do you like to do edits and revisions on your manuscript? Do you print them out, do them all on computer, or have you tried using the Kindle?

I had coffee with a friend of mine last week. She’s also a big reader—now almost exclusively on the Kindle.

She’s currently reading a novel for our book club. “Let me tell you,” she said with a frown, “I’m having a real problem with this book.”

I perked up. This is a friend that doesn’t even have a problem with obscure Russian literature…so if commercial fiction was stumping her, I was all ears.

“This writer has 7 or 8 different names that start with the letter m. And there are absolutely no textual reminders of the characters’ identities. I can’t tell who the heck they are or how they relate to each other. And some of the characters have real names and nicknames.”

She was pretty agitated about it by now and was waving her arms around and sloshing her coffee.

“And on top of it all, I can’t just flip back and figure out who these people are! With a paperback, I’d spend half a minute just flipping back until I got a clue who the character is. With a Kindle, it’s just not that easy. I’m getting ready to give up on this book.”

What the author was doing wasn’t good for any book, of course. Having characters with names that start with the same letter can get confusing…especially that many names. And this was an author published with a major house.

The trouble was compounded by the fact that the writer hadn’t put in any of those little tagging reminders of who the character is (especially when they’ve been offstage for a while.) It’s helpful to have a ‘Jenny hopped in the car, still wearing her scrubs from work.’ Really, you don’t even have to be that vague with the reminders: sometimes a ‘Jenny, Cameron’s sister, got in the car’ is fine to slip in.

To make matters worse, there were nicknames for more than one character. And these nicknames weren’t like ‘sweetie.’ No, these were actual names. And the nicknames weren’t just truncated parts of the character name (Mike for Michael.) They were totally different.

My friend mulled aloud a few minutes about whether the book would have been salvageable if the story hadn’t been on the Kindle. She said that she loved her Kindle, but still missed being able to quickly flip through a book instead of using a “go to” function.

I’m sure that future roll-outs of the Kindle will probably fix this issue—maybe they’ll have touch screens or a quick scrolling option.

But in the meantime, it offered another reason to double-check my manuscripts for name problems. Is there anything confusing in there? Would a reader need to flip around in my book to try and figure out who the character is? If so, they’re working too hard. This is supposed to be entertainment…better to just fix it.

Especially since flipping pages isn’t exactly easy with Kindles.

Are there character naming problems that you run into as a reader or writer? If you have a Kindle, do you miss page flipping?