I love creating mood boards for my stories. In fact, I can spend way too much time on them. Here’s one for my contemporary romance, Saving Mansfield Park:
American Finley Bertram, a modern-day descendant of Fanny Price, wants to renovate the rundown estate of Mansfield Park she’s inherited in England, but she’s faced with renovating her life at the same time. After failing the bar exam and breaking off her engagement with an overbearing fiancé, she’s riddled with self-doubt, not sure she can even deal with a plumbing leak, much less fix up a massive estate. To turn the place into a successful wedding venue business, she’ll have to keep it out of the hands of the devious Caro Bingley, head of the Bingley hotel chain. while trying not to go broke with a money pit of a house. Throw in a ditzy ghost, a cranky swan, a lost pug, a talented chef sister with a tendency to set the kitchen on fire, plus the distraction of a handsome landscape architect, and Finley has her work cut out for her.
Time to look back so I can look forward. I don’t do New Year’s resolutions but when spring arrives, I take stock of where I am and where I want to be. 2022 was both a good year and a bad year for me. The bad part was that my literary agent decided she no longer wanted to represent me. This is not unusual in the publishing world and we had a rather strange story of how we came to work with each other. It turned out that the types of stories I wrote were not really to her interest so she didn’t feel she could do a good job of selling them to a publisher. It is so important to have an advocate for your writing, that it was for the best we parted ways. However, it was also discouraging for me to contemplate finding another agent. I had also long wanted to move beyond publishing fiction for children and young adults into also publishing book club-type fiction for adults. Faced with doubts I could do this, I still worked on some pages of a story set in 1968. These were the pages I submitted to the Ohio Arts Council. It was a tremendous boost of encouragement to receive one of their individual awards for excellence.
Over the years, I have donated my time to doing free classroom and zoom visits, and to donate books to the Crayons to Computers teacher resource organization, and other organizations which provide free books to young readers. However, after a few years of writing setbacks, I had almost given up continuing to work on my writing for publication. This grant has convinced me to continue to try to create stories which I can share. Please know if you are reading this, that your support of the arts is tremendously important, even if you may not be aware of how an individual artist has benefited.
I am a huge mystery fan, particularly of the puzzle-type mysteries of Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Martha Grimes and a plethora of similar mystery writers. (Hmmm…maybe not ‘plethora,’ perhaps it should be a ‘sleuth’ of mystery writers?) Anyway, I’ve been very interested in reading some middle grade mysteries to see exactly how a writer takes a grim plot point, a murder(!), and weaves it into a story for 8 to 12 year olds. In my hunt for clues (see what I did there?)
I asked Fleur Bradley a couple of questions about her book, MIDNIGHT AT THE BARCLAY HOTEL. (Illustrated by Xavier Bonet.)
First, a brief description of the plot: “Hunting ghosts and solving the case before checkout? All in a weekend’s work. When JJ Jacobson convinced his mom to accept a surprise invitation to an all-expenses-paid weekend getaway at the illustrious Barclay Hotel, he never imagined that he’d find himself in the midst of a murder mystery. He thought he was in for a run-of-the-mill weekend ghost hunting at the most haunted spot in town, but when he arrives at the Barclay Hotel and his mother is blamed for the hotel owner’s death, he realizes his weekend is going to be anything but ordinary.
Now, with the help of his new friends, Penny and Emma, JJ has to track down a killer, clear his mother’s name, and maybe even meet a ghost or two along the way.”
The hotel is based on the Stanley Hotel in Colorado, the place that inspired THE SHINING. Terrific setting, right? There is also a terrific twist, which I won’t give away, but I was delighted that I didn’t’ see it coming. All too often, if you’ve read a lot of mysteries, you can see the twist before it’s actually revealed in the story.
Fleur, thanks so much for taking the time to answer my questions.
1. It seems like the writing of middle grade murder mysteries is similar to writing cozy mysteries for adults. There must be a fine line in terms of how to depict a murder without it being so shocking, the story is no longer enjoyable. For example, would you say in general the dead person is usually someone the main character doesn’t know well or even at all before the murder? Can you give us another tip for how to navigate what to include or not include in a middle grade murder mystery?
It’s always hard to put out any definitive rules, because the minute you decide what they are, someone will break them 🙂 For Midnight at the Barclay Hotel, I definitely followed those same rules as in a cozy, taking my cues from Agatha Christie. Since the book was intended for younger kids, I knew I couldn’t make it too scary. That distance you mentioned is important. For older readers, I’ve read books that have a character closer to the kid main character die, but then it often becomes a story about grief (one of my favorite examples is The Truth As Told by Mason Buttle by Leslie Connor). Since I wanted it to be a fun mystery, I kept the murder of-screen, distant and non-gory.
2. Now for a more technical writing question – There seems to be constant debate about what point of view to use for different age groups. I really enjoyed your use of an omniscient POV because it felt like I was listening to you tell the story. How did you settle on that?
I wanted to add a bit of whimsy (almost like an old butler was the narrator), so keeping everything in third person worked best. There are three kid perspectives–first person would have made it hard to keep this from getting too difficult voice-wise. In an earlier draft, the narrator (me, basically) breaks the fourth wall and addresses the reader. That ended up on the cutting room floor in edits, but you can still get a hint of it throughout. It keeps things light and fun, which is what I aimed to do with this book. With Midnight at the Barclay Hotel, I hope kids get hooked on mysteries, just like I am.
If you haven’t heard the phrase “the book of my heart,” it’s a manuscript writers talk about when they are referring to a story they felt they just had to write, one that means more to them than anything else they’ve written. Some of these do get published, but many languish unloved except by their creators. I have one of these. It’s gotten no love from editors and agents have been lukewarm on it. I might revise it some day and try again, because I’ve realized a few important reasons why I’m the only one who thinks it’s special in its current form
I chose to put in things in that were important to me, but I derailed the story with some of them. Their importance doesn’t shine through in the overall picture, and in some cases they drag the story down. I broke my own rule of ‘Focus on the Story’ not on myself.
These stories in particular need some very critical readers to weigh in on readability. If a story is that close to you, it’s very hard to look at it with an editorial eye, no matter how good you are at editing your own work. And if you get critiques you don’t like on it, you have to take a deep breath and really consider what’s being suggested. It’s often tough to cut and slash at a manuscript like this but if your goal is to get it published, it can be a necessity. If the story is important to you the way it is, then of course it’s okay not to change it. The desire to be published often conflicts with the desire to write a particular story. It’s up to each person to decide. And my story? Now that I’ve written it and it’s been put away for a couple of years, it will be easier for me to go back and edit. I’ve moved on, you might say. Like an old love, I still am fond of it, but there are many more stories to focus my heart on.
I’m excited! To keep myself from climbing the walls turning this gray stay-at-home time, I’ve been occupied designing a Jane Austen-inspired board game called Saving Mansfield Park. I’m going to do a Kickstarter very soon to turn it into a reality. The game doesn’t require any knowledge of Jane Austen, though it’s a lot more fun for her readers.
The short description of the game: Franny Bertram, the great, great, etc., granddaughter of Fanny Price and Edmund Bertram has purchased the dilapidated remains of the once great estate of Mansfield Park. She intends to restore it but she doesn’t have enough money, so she’s called on friends and acquaintances to help her find some valuable antiques in the cluttered rooms that she can sell. Several of the descendants of Miss Austin’s characters have arrived to help search. But money is not Franny’s only problem. The ruthless great, great, etc. granddaughter of Caroline Bingley is on her way to purchase the place if Franny can’t make the next mortgage payment. It’s a race to see who can find enough items to save the house before Miss Bingley makes it through the front door.
Here’s the longer version:
Mansfield Park has fallen into terrible disrepair. Franny Bertram , the great, great, great, etc., granddaughter of Edmund Bertram and Fanny Price, has taken out a mortgage and purchased it, intending to turn it into a bed and breakfast all while restoring it to its former glory. However, at the moment she has only managed to refurbish two rooms for guests and is open for limited business. She is the resident manager, cook, maid and house restorer, living in a servant’s room on the upper floor with her rescue pug, named Pug. The only other inhabitants besides the occasional guest, are a ghost or two from Miss Austen’s time and a cranky swan who hangs out in the reflecting pools in the front garden.
Much of the house is still very cluttered with the accumulation of decades of items, most of it too damaged to be of any value. Franny knows she can turn the house into a successful inn but she is lacking the necessary funds, and just recently, disaster has struck. A storm ripped off part of the roof and the temporary patch is not enough to keep the water out. Without an emergency repair, the house may have to be condemned and torn down. The temporary patch has used up all of Beth’s funds and she is now behind on the mortgage payment.
In hopes of saving the house, Franny has decided to look for a partner to go into business with her. Just when all seems lost, a proprietor of a small antique shop contacts Franny. He has a list of items he wants that will give her enough money to tide her over.
Because Franny is overwhelmed with renovations, she doesn’t have time to look for the items herself, so she has put out a call to friends and acquaintances to help. As an added incentive, she’s decided the first person to fulfill the proprietor’s list will get a share of the profits once the bed and breakfast is fully operational. Because a previous owner turned the library into an exercise studio, most of the library’s books are stored in the attic. Franny hopes there are some complete sets of Miss Austen’s six major works somewhere in the piles and piles of books, so she is hopeful that if those are found, the sale of them will provide additional funds.
As the helpers arrive, another potentially devasting problem arises. Miss Caroline Bingley, of the Bingley Hotel and Resort Corporation, is on her way to the house to meet the banker who holds the mortgage, funds in hand to purchase Mansfield Park outright. Beth knows Caroline because they attended the same college, and she knows Caroline is ruthless in pursing what she wants.
It’s a race to see who can find the necessary items before Miss Bingley arrives on the doorstep!
More posts will follow with additional details. I’m really hoping to get this funded!
I’ve made more than my share of mistakes in the twenty plus years I’ve been writing, but in terms of getting and staying published my biggest mistake in the early years was not working on new projects while trying to get an existing one signed by an agent or sold to an editor.
I put so much effort into my first book – which I’ve since gone on to self-publish after much more revision – that I couldn’t imagine putting any more effort into another book unless I had some indication that I could actually write well enough to get published. I spent five years rewriting and revising that book, sure I was going to hit on the magical right words to get it published. I came close a few times, but never quite hit it, partly because at the time I didn’t know how to write good query letters and I didn’t know enough about storytelling.
It was only when I wrote a different book in a different genre that I got an agent and then a publishing deal. But then I continued on with my mistake. I didn’t write anything new even though there were long stretches of time while the manuscript was with the agent and then with the editor. I should have been writing that whole time.
I would have improved my writing more quickly, I would have had more manuscripts to show the editor (I did get a deal for a second book, which was great, but I had to write it under a tighter deadline because I didn’t start it as early as I could have done.)
I’ve since learned that it’s much better for me and for my publishing future to keep working on new unsold projects in the waiting times for contracted work, even if it’s partial novels or novels that need major revision. It’s helped my writing, because with each story, I run into new problems and I have to consider how to tell a particular story. It’s also made me write faster, because I don’t fall out of practice. When I do school or Skype visits, I tell the students that writing is largely a craft, and talent isn’t the most important part of it. Learning to write well is like learning to play an instrument or a sport or another artistic pursuit. Most people aren’t good at it without practice.
So don’t make my mistakes! Write, write, write.
If you missed my earlier posts on 18 days of writing and publishing tips, post 1 is here.
And here’s one of my books that I haven’t talked about much in previous posts, my upper Middle grade adventure, WOLF STORM in which young actors filming a movie on location in the mountains find themselves in an all-to-real adventure. (That’s my lovely little cat, Colette, who I miss every day and who was not happy wearing her wolf costume.)
I posted about how valuable mentor texts are for my writing here, and will do more, but I also wanted to post about mentor movies. There are certain movies that have taught me so much about storytelling, and when I’m in a slump, I rewatch one or more of them.
Apollo 13 is one of them. The movie is an adaptation from a book by Jim Lovell, one of the astronauts on the mission. William Broyles Jr. and Al Reinert did the screenplay. The film tells the story of the mission that nearly cost the lives of the astronauts, when an explosion onboard depletes the oxygen supply. The mission becomes one to figure out how to get the astronauts back to Earth before their air runs out.
Most of us aren’t going to write stories so dramatic, but there are takeaways from watching it that have helped me in my stories.
First, the opening. I hate to get into debates about prologues, because the people who hate them will not budge, but here’s my view: It depends on the story! I’ve used them in two of my books, and will probably do so again. If you need something that really sets up the tone of the story or foreshadows what is going to happen, prologues are an excellent way to do that.
The opening of Apollo 13 is a prologue, a sequence using actual news footage and images of the horrific fire on Apollo 1 when the astronauts were rehearsing the launch procedures. All three astronauts died. It works in the movie because it immediately reminds viewers of how dangerous it is to be an astronaut, even when they aren’t actually in space. Even if we didn’t already know the plot of the movie, we know something bad is coming, and that in a suspense/thriller story is important. That tiny trickle of dread will only grow stronger as the story progresses.
The next scene is a party at one of the astronaut’s houses where they are all gathered to watch the moon landing of Apollo. This is an inspired bit of storytelling. It shows the astronauts’ ordinary world, making them seem like real people, and manages to impart a lot of information along the way. I suspect there was some debate over putting this scene first. I’m sure there was a push to set it at NASA because that would be the cool setting, but it would have made most readers feel removed from the main characters.
I’m a big fan of chapters starting in the character’s ordinary world, and then using some event to let the reader know something big is going to happen soon. This happens in Apollo 13 when we see Marilyn Lovell, Jim’s wife, talks about how nervous Neil Armstrong’s wife must be. There is also a mention that of the astronauts’ main concern – they are afraid future missions will be cancelled due to budget cuts before they get to go. This is a useful technique of dramatic irony. The viewer (or reader) knows something much worse than this is going to happen. It’s like you wish you could get into the story and warn the character.
I could go on and on about some of the latter parts of the movie and what works so well, but I think I’ll save that for a later post. I encourage everyone to take a look at this movie-I didn’t even realize exactly how broad of an appeal it had was until the time my daughter came into the room when I was watching it-she must have been about ten and not really interested in many adult movies-and she sat down and watched it all the way through, enthralled.
I was lucky to have Barbara Lalicki at HarperCollins as my first editor. She had edited Beverly Cleary’s books as well as many other established authors so I was very intimidated to open my first edits from her. Barbara was meticulous. She even called me one Saturday after we’d already finished the page passes of WILDFIRE RUN to discuss one word (!) she wasn’t sure fit well.
I learned so much about writing from her. The absolute best advice she ever gave was the little comments on the first couple of edits of the book. I’d see this penciled in (she edited by hand) “Make it bigger” at various scenes throughout the book.
“Make it bigger” meant more dramatic or more interesting or both. I whisper that to myself now as I’m editing a draft, considering whether I’ve developed each scene to its maximum potential. Most times I haven’t, because like many writers, I push to get a draft done, sometimes taking the easy way out and writing scenes that are too standard, too expected, and too undeveloped.
I found this in my sci fi trilogy – I had a short outline necessary to sell the trilogy, but once I started writing it, what seemed fine in the outline turned out to be flat in storytelling terms. I went through the whole book and made scenes bigger. I also did this with my YA historical coming out next year, GONE BY NIGHTFALL. It’s set during the Russian revolution so lots of drama is happening all around the characters, but the main character was on the sidelines too much and the middle was dragging. I added in one scene which changed the whole feeling of the middle, but I didn’t figure this out until four drafts in.
I guess the moral of this story is ‘don’t take the easy way out’ and once a draft is finished, you often can still find ways to push the story further to make it better.
Write on!
Here’s the cover of GONE BY NIGHTFALL, coming out January 21st, 2020. (I love this cover!)
If you are interested in my other writing and publishing tips posts, post 1 is here.
In trying to get published, it’s important to be honest with yourself about your writing ability. Yes, you need self-confidence to keep going in the face of years of rejection, but you also always need to keep a check on the ego and realize what ways you can improve. Many times a rejection is because a story just wasn’t right for an agent or editor, but other times it’s because the writing actually needs work.
The way I motivate myself to work on my writing is by reading my mentor texts. I couldn’t write publishable books without them to inspire me. Even now, nine years since my first book was published, I go back to certain books and authors to reread their work to know how I should push myself to be a better writer. I admire several different writers, all for different aspects of writing technique.
This post is about my mentor texts for setting and description. Description is one of my two areas of writing I need the most work on and that I struggle with in each book.
The books I go back to when I’m feeling particularly frustrated or when I want to give examples of great description in a writing talk are the first three books in Mary Stewart’s Arthurian saga, THE CRYSTAL CAVE, THE HOLLOW HILLS, and THE LAST ENCHANTMENT. I don’t write fantasy, at least not yet, but the genre doesn’t really matter in this type of mentor text. Here are two paragraphs from the prologue of THE CRYSTAL CAVE:
It was dark, and the place was cold, but he had lit a small fire of wood, which smoked sullenly but gave a little warmth. It had been raining all day, and from the branches near the mouth of the cave water still dripped, and a steady trickle over flowed the lip of the well, soaking the ground below. Several times, restless, he had left the cave, and now he walked out below the cliff to the grove where his horse stood tethered.
With the coming of dusk the rain had stopped, but a mist had risen, creeping knee-high through the trees so that they stood like ghosts, and the grazing horse floated like a swan. It was a grey, and more than ever ghostly because it grazed so quietly; he had torn up a scarf and wound fragments of cloth round the bit so that no jingle should betray him. The bit was gilded, and the torn strips were of silk, for he was a king’s son. If they had caught him, they would have killed him. He was just eighteen.
I think this is just brilliant. I can imagine the scene perfectly and feel the damp atmosphere, and the fire ‘which smoked sullenly.’ Stewart is particularly good at evoking sound in her descriptions: water dripping, and even though the bit is not jingling, describing the muffling of it makes us hear what it might have sounded like unmuffled.
The other brilliant part of her descriptive ability is to impart information about the character and the plot in unusual ways: The bit was gilded, and the torn strips were of silk, for he was a king’s son. If they had caught him, they would have killed him. These two sentences are full of both information and tension, and just amazing.
If I seem to be gushing, it’s because I am gushing. Stewart was one of the first writers I really studied when I was trying to figure out how to write. If you aren’t familiar with her books ( they were published in the 1970s) they are in most libraries and still in print to purchase. Be forewarned, some of the later editions have really cheesy covers. Don’t let that turn you off! The ones in the picture below are fine but I’ve got some editions with covers that make me cringe.
If you missed my earlier writing and publishing tips posts, post 1 is here.
Sometimes when a writer is so focused on developing their main characters, keeping the plot going and polishing the writing, they slip up and don’t spend enough time on making their secondary characters memorable enough, so that those characters end up as cardboard stereotypes. Writers often don’t even realize they’ve fallen into that trap, because the characters are so much a part of popular culture that they seem to fit the story. But fitting into expectations leads to average, and in today’s competitive publishing world, writing an average story is going to lessen your chances of getting published.
(I couldn’t think of the right kind of cat picture to go with this post, so a cat hunting out something to get rid of (a stereotype!) is as close as I could get.)
When I read one of those stereotypical characters, they really lessen the story for me. For example, I can’t stand when the mean girl in a high school setting is the beautiful blond cheerleader with a ponytail. I want a better villain than that. Granted, there is a reason those types show up in stories, because too many authors either remember those girls from high school or have seen too many tv shows and movies that also rely on the stereotype.
If it’s a high school villain who must be a popular cheerleader, make her a little quirky in her own way. Maybe she helps her father do taxidermy or she is a genius at math, anything that will surprise a reader. Quirky villains are more memorable and seem more real.
Another example that makes me groan is the computer nerd stereotype, either a skinny guy with ugly glasses or a heavy-set guy who also wears ugly glasses. For example, Jurassic Park does so many things so well in the storytelling, but I hate that they made the bad guy a nerdy slob who won’t stop eating. Again, there are people in the real world who fit the stereotype, but there are plenty of other real people who don’t.
And we can’t forget the jock who is a handsome jerk. If you’ve got one of these characters, you have to work harder to round them out so the reader will be able to remember long after they’ve finished the book.
I don’t have a handsome jock in my sci fi trilogy but I do have a character that somewhat fits that category. Quinn is the main character and Decker is his nemesis at the beginning of the story. Decker is bigger, stronger and older and likes to order Quinn around. The quirk that saves Decker from being a stereotype is that he is a musician, and wears a tiny musical instrument on a cord around his neck all the time, something like an ocarina. I also made the character not be a jerk around children, so that Quinn’s younger sister likes Decker.
Publishing is so competitive that anything you can do to make your stories more memorable will help, so look over your secondary characters and see how you can make them stand out.
Here’s my sci fi trilogy that started this series of posts. If you haven’t read any of the earlier ones on writing and publishing tips, Post 1 is here.
MAIN WEBSITE:
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contact: deegarretson at gmail.com
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Russian Revolution:
World War I:
Presidential kid adventure:
If the President's son and his friends got trapped at Camp David when the security systems went haywire, could they escape?
HarperCollins
A Junior Library Guild Selection
WOLF STORM
Sometimes filming a movie can go very wrong...and turn all too real.
A Scholastic Book Club Selection
When a 19th century James Bond-type spy teams up with an art student who is definitely no Bond girl, will they be able to stop a royal assassination plot?
THE GARGOYLE IN THE SEINE is one of my historical mysteries for adults and older teens.
Dee Garretson 