My newest adventure

Taking a break from my newest project to write a quick note.. The new story is quite a bit different from the last two, so I thought I would share a little bit as I go..

As I mentioned before, with the last book, I started generating images of the characters using AI, to keep me company as I wrote their stories. Developing characters takes quite a bit of time, if you aren’t using the same tired tropes. For characters, I follow the cardinal rule of writing (the one that I refuse to follow for anything else: “Write what you know!”

My answer to that is that what I know isn’t a particular place, time period, genre, or type of story**.

What I know is: People. I have a good understanding (and experience) with human nature, human emotions, and behavior – even what we often think of as ‘irrational behavior.’ I understand what motivates people and typical social norms. The caveat of that being that while I can empathize and sympathize with other people, I can’t feel what they are feeling, so the only way to authentically write about what the characters are feeling – is to put a little bit of “me” into many of my characters.

This means that my characters drive the stories.. But I research everything else – even places and things that I think I know. I have an obsession for details – and I enjoy the research process. To me, it’s more like a treasure hunt, and it’s something that I want readers to enjoy as well. I want my readers to be able to say, “well, that’s interesting” about any random stray detail and be able to “google” it or look it up and find more information about it.

For example, I like to put my fictional characters into as real a situation as possible. That means that if my character is eating peach cobbler in “Mabel’s Restaurant” in 1953, in a certain Memphis neighborhood, and her waitress’s name is Doris, you can bet your 35 cent pie, that a woman named Doris was working at that restaurant, in the 1950’s, and said peach cobbler was on the menu.

That’s because I think a good book, article or movie is one that makes you think. It’s something that stirs your curiosity, maybe even long after you’ve finished it. I want my readers to have that same feeling when they read my works – where they stop and highlight a section, or mark it on their kindle. I want readers to enjoy looking up these details and thinking, “Well, I’ll be darned.. I thought she was just making that up..”

The best compliment I can ever receive is when someone tells me that they ended up reading another book about something that I mentioned in one of my stories.

But.. Sometimes this habit gets me into strange situations… Situations that defy that cardinal rule that all writers are taught.. On a whim, I decided that one of my characters – well, her personality just meant that she wasn’t going to stay in Memphis. She was young, she was adventurous and she was ready to see something new. So, she decided to go to Paris…

Now, I’ve been to Paris.. But that doesn’t mean that I know Paris. What it does mean is that it took me over four months to research all of the information that I needed to write two chapters. I was looking at a specific time period, and a specific focus – so I ended up with my own specialty reference library on that microcosm of Paris, filled with different books, articles, maps and other reference materials so that I could depict the scenes accurately. Does it really matter to my readers? Probably not, but it matters to me.

** I don’t have a hankering to write anymore stories about being at the front – I’ve done plenty of that already. I don’t want to write about the life I already know, because I don’t write for my readers – I write for myself. (I love my readers, but I don’t try to write using the popular formulas for novels – maybe I should because it’s a good way to win readers particularly in specific genres like romance, but that’s not who I am or what I do..

In my next post – if readers are interested – I’d like to share some more of the AI generated images that I am using while writing this story. I don’t talk to them, (at least not outloud), but the definitely keep me company..