Bag the Cat

We interrupt the regular broadcast of news about the War of 1812 to bloviate upon our writing career, such as it is, what there is of it, as the family used to say about a vaguely unsatisfactory meal. On Wednesday last I had lunch with my agent. The Work In Progress I had hoped to hand him was not quite finished, so that I was forced to deliver a lame elevator pitch for it.

Turns out that the plot I had so craftily constructed last spring with the aid of that excellent how-to book, Save the Cat, was so complex and convoluted that it did not readily lend itself to an elevator pitch. This is a red flag for flaws in a manuscript, by the way. If you have to go on all day about what your book is about, to the point where your agent's eyes glaze over (assuming you're lucky enough to have an agent), then the book is probably a dog. Good books beget snappy log lines.

About halfway through the lunch he began offering helpful suggestions to improve the work, or at least make it easier for him to sell. By the time I had finished my post-prandial coffee I realized that a Major Rewrite was in order. Harold and I had company this weekend, so that today was the first chance I had to get to it. Many things in the WIP want straightening out, but the most starkly evident is this:

The cat must go.

So with apologies to all my fellow cat-lovers out there I'm removing all references to the kitty. I'm not even worried about what it does to my word count. Word count is the least of my problems right now.

Organizing Your Plot

I used to keep an outline on the computer of whatever novel I was working on. That way I could look at it, see what day it was when such-and-such happened, see who knew about what, who was still friends with whom, who had been murdered and who was still alive &c &c. You would think a person could keep stuff like that in her head, but I like to jump around so much that it's hard for me to know where I am in the cosmic order of things.

And so I kept four files open on the computer whenever I was working: my outline; my research file, which might contain head shots of my characters and details of their lives, as well as maps of cities, train timetables, historical timelines and the like; an outtake file, where I could save things I cut in case I came to like them again; and, of course, the actual Work in Progress.

The trouble with this system was that as I worked things changed, not only the names of characters but the sequence of events, the events themselves, even the days of the week and the dates. Sometimes I remembered to go back and revise the outline, sometimes not.

When I set out to write my latest, I hit upon a terrific way to keep track of the stuff I used to use the outline for. Here it is, in case you work in Word and want to use it too.

Embed your notes about the action and the day of the week in the text as separate paragraphs, and style them H2. Chapter headings, of course, are H1. Another approach is to rough out your outline in H2 headings and then fill in the text as you write.

In this way you can run a Table of Contents (Insert - Field - TOC), update it from time to time, and see at once that you have only one Friday in the week and that it follows Thursday, that Millicent already knows Angelique's secret by page 30, and that the scene you need to go back and fix between Millicent and Rupert is on page 22.

Try it. You'll like it.

Return with us now to Yesteryear

The stars being in conjunction, the rights in hand, and the hardware and software up and running, I have chosen this auspicious time to put my first two published books, the first two books in the Nick Magaracz series, up on Kindle.

The mechanics of the process are tedious but not difficult: Scan in two pages as tiff files, convert from tiff files to RTF files, repeat until end-of-book. Put RTF files together in word processor as book-length work. Comb through for glitches. Format paragraphs.

Publish on Kindle per Amazon instructions. Be pleased with the results.

This description of the process leaves out the emotional impact of revisiting Trenton, New Jersey, as it was in the early 1980s. Things change. These two books--Unbalanced Accounts and The Death Tape--have become historical novels while my back was turned.

Down-at-heel P.I. Nick Magaracz himself must be eighty years old by now, bouncing his grandchildren on his knee in his house in Hamilton Township, thinking about writing his memoirs, maybe, missing his wife, Ethel, who died of cancer in 2005. The clerks of Unbalanced Accounts are all retired as well. So long ago. As for The Death Tape, it takes place in the ancient world of large mainframe COBOL-driven data processing, as remote today as the lost world of Atlantis.

And yet these books are still worth reading, though a whole generation has grown up since I wrote them, and my writing style is different now. The characters still come alive for me. The plots are as strange and compelling as ever.

Got a Kindle? Give them a try. They're cheap! They're entertaining!