- Published on
An early beta-reader for An Incoming Tide gave constructive criticism about my plot line. I had put a murder in the first chapter, was clear about who-dun-it and gave hints around why-dun-it. She suggested that it would be better to bury the hatchet, put the murder deeper into the book.
But I liked my first chapter with its sordid tale.
That early version went on to follow the life of the murderer—not a happy one, but one in which he was successful and esteemed by his colleagues.
Then, I made matters even worse when I restructured the storyline in a later version. Not only did the murderer not get found out and dealt with, but the whole story flashed ahead twenty-five years without him ever being punished for the horrific murder of the first chapter.
All of this was, alas, not an acceptable morality tale like murder fiction should be.
The murder mystery genre is our modern day morality tale (along with the crime and forensic dramas on tv). In those, the evil doer is caught and punished by the mechanism of society’s system of justice—typically by a detective or scientist who, despite all obstacles, figures it out.
You know the smart-detective story. It goes something like this—smart-detective with annoying character flaws sifts through a handful of suspects to solve the crime; and in solving the crime, smart-detective then saves a poor secondary character still at risk; and, in the end, those impacted by the horrible tragedy are grateful to smart-detective because they are able to go back to living their normal lives never needing to be thought of again.
Any self-respecting author writing about murder knows that is the way it is done.
Well, any self-respecting author except me.
Readers who love books which follow that iconic plot line probably won’t get An Incoming Tide. By not seeing what they think should be there, they’ll miss what is.
I didn’t write to replicate genre. I wrote to be real. After more than four decades as a mental health professional, I knew that life doesn’t imitate art with its tidy storylines and solvable puzzles. As the story emerged, it turned out to be about what I knew from the tough work of being with clients who had experienced interpersonal trauma, about courageous individuals who face the difficult circumstances of their lives and find a way to survive, about beauty that emerges from chaos and darkness. I wrote about the power of healthy, committed, loving relationship.
And, recognizing the harm that humans can do to each other, the story also turned out to be about narcissism, and about folk who just do their job regardless of the impact of their actions on others.
Other writers can produce books that follow genre. Readers seeking stories like that have lots of other novels to read—plug a new set of characters and context into a standard plot and everyone can feel satisfied at the end.
But I’ve been witness to the real life experience of trauma, and of courage, and of beauty, and of love. I would be a disappointment to me if I left behind what I know really well, replace that with what others do. Perhaps, you would be disappointed in me, too.
Oh, a glimpse beyond An Incoming Tide . . . I confess, I really wanted things to eventually turn out okay for the principle character in An Incoming Tide because I also know that people are able to heal and go on, even if it takes a while. So, I have written Undertow, the sequel novel. It is about healing and renewal, and about courage and hope and the healing power of healthy relationships and the presence of beauty in the midst of chaos and darkness too.
Smile. There’s a therapy dog in it, too!
Index of Previous Blogs
(click on side panel to open)
September 2021. "It is beautiful because it tells the truth."
Beauty is not just about pretty, beauty can reveal the subjective experience of external realities.
October 2021. "Flow versus Focus"
As an author, I reflect on these two vastly different aspects of creating readable fiction.
But I liked my first chapter with its sordid tale.
That early version went on to follow the life of the murderer—not a happy one, but one in which he was successful and esteemed by his colleagues.
Then, I made matters even worse when I restructured the storyline in a later version. Not only did the murderer not get found out and dealt with, but the whole story flashed ahead twenty-five years without him ever being punished for the horrific murder of the first chapter.
All of this was, alas, not an acceptable morality tale like murder fiction should be.
The murder mystery genre is our modern day morality tale (along with the crime and forensic dramas on tv). In those, the evil doer is caught and punished by the mechanism of society’s system of justice—typically by a detective or scientist who, despite all obstacles, figures it out.
You know the smart-detective story. It goes something like this—smart-detective with annoying character flaws sifts through a handful of suspects to solve the crime; and in solving the crime, smart-detective then saves a poor secondary character still at risk; and, in the end, those impacted by the horrible tragedy are grateful to smart-detective because they are able to go back to living their normal lives never needing to be thought of again.
Any self-respecting author writing about murder knows that is the way it is done.
Well, any self-respecting author except me.
Readers who love books which follow that iconic plot line probably won’t get An Incoming Tide. By not seeing what they think should be there, they’ll miss what is.
I didn’t write to replicate genre. I wrote to be real. After more than four decades as a mental health professional, I knew that life doesn’t imitate art with its tidy storylines and solvable puzzles. As the story emerged, it turned out to be about what I knew from the tough work of being with clients who had experienced interpersonal trauma, about courageous individuals who face the difficult circumstances of their lives and find a way to survive, about beauty that emerges from chaos and darkness. I wrote about the power of healthy, committed, loving relationship.
And, recognizing the harm that humans can do to each other, the story also turned out to be about narcissism, and about folk who just do their job regardless of the impact of their actions on others.
Other writers can produce books that follow genre. Readers seeking stories like that have lots of other novels to read—plug a new set of characters and context into a standard plot and everyone can feel satisfied at the end.
But I’ve been witness to the real life experience of trauma, and of courage, and of beauty, and of love. I would be a disappointment to me if I left behind what I know really well, replace that with what others do. Perhaps, you would be disappointed in me, too.
Oh, a glimpse beyond An Incoming Tide . . . I confess, I really wanted things to eventually turn out okay for the principle character in An Incoming Tide because I also know that people are able to heal and go on, even if it takes a while. So, I have written Undertow, the sequel novel. It is about healing and renewal, and about courage and hope and the healing power of healthy relationships and the presence of beauty in the midst of chaos and darkness too.
Smile. There’s a therapy dog in it, too!
Index of Previous Blogs
(click on side panel to open)
September 2021. "It is beautiful because it tells the truth."
Beauty is not just about pretty, beauty can reveal the subjective experience of external realities.
October 2021. "Flow versus Focus"
As an author, I reflect on these two vastly different aspects of creating readable fiction.
- Published on
Everything human takes time…
This wisdom was given to me more than forty years ago when I was just starting out as a mental health therapist. My mentor must have sensed impatience in me.
Now as an author I realize the essence of fiction, both in its writing and also in its reading, is a very human endeavour. It is about finding meaning, about relationship and companionship, about the good and the harmful bumping up against each other—the stuff of being human.
And it takes time. If you rush it, you lose that essence.
The restructure, revise, edit, proof and polish phases of writing An Incoming Tide involved daily work for months on end–—actually, ten months oozing into an eleventh, twice as long as the initial writing. At times it just felt technical: about things like verb tenses, and commas and annoying little wording booboos. But at its heart, it was about the characters there—the ones I cared deeply about, and even the ones I despised. I didn’t want anything to get in the way of my future reader’s subjective experience of them. For them, both my readers and my characters, I needed my writing to be clear so meaning, and relationship and the way good and harm bump up against each other would shine through.
It has been a very human endeavour, and it has taken lots of time.
Human ultimately comes down to individual subjectivity, both mine and yours, in worlds both fictional and otherwise. Our subjective, internal map of the world dictates how we make it through the outer world of circumstance and our engagement with others— others who, of course, are navigating from within their own internal maps of the world, too. Readers of An Incoming Tide will bring their own subjectivity to their experience of the characters within, their story, and the humanness there.
It is that internal subjectivity that guides us—desperately or disappointedly at times, delightfully at others— guides us to discover meaning, experience companionship, and responsibly recognize and promote what is good.
But we can get impatient, or at least I can.
Everything takes longer than it takes.
After the mentor’s magic of the first adage, this second one came to me as a result of my own experience of elaborating my inner world while engaging with the outer one. I was sensing my own impatience.
Part of one’s internal world are expectations. We don’t always get those right. Life doesn’t go exactly as we predict because other humans are involved—and even our internal maps of what should be oft lead us astray.
I had great work done for me on An Incoming Tide by FriesenPress. You get to experience that good work when you look at the cover of the novel—I still get captivated by the hovering eye over the incoming tide depicted there. As you read this blog on an elegantly designed website, you are reaping the benefits of a Designer and a Promotional Specialist who were willing to take the time to make beautiful the ideas I had.
At the outset, I didn’t understand why it would take the length of time that the consultant and Publication Specialist at FriesenPress said it would. They said, it just would. And in the end, it did. They were right.
Because it took longer than I thought it would take, it has made my subjective world of being an author better. I hope so for you as a consumer, too.
These two adages, Everything human takes time and Everything takes longer than it takes stayed with me for over forty years on the frontlines of helping those with significant mental health difficulties. And now they flop over into my world as an author.
As much as impatience, and frustration, and bewilderment about the human condition of others (and I guess, of myself) has been part of that journey, ultimately it has been a very human endeavour—full of meaning, and companionship, and taking responsibility to bring goodness into this world.
I will never get it completely right, just better as I go along.
This wisdom was given to me more than forty years ago when I was just starting out as a mental health therapist. My mentor must have sensed impatience in me.
Now as an author I realize the essence of fiction, both in its writing and also in its reading, is a very human endeavour. It is about finding meaning, about relationship and companionship, about the good and the harmful bumping up against each other—the stuff of being human.
And it takes time. If you rush it, you lose that essence.
The restructure, revise, edit, proof and polish phases of writing An Incoming Tide involved daily work for months on end–—actually, ten months oozing into an eleventh, twice as long as the initial writing. At times it just felt technical: about things like verb tenses, and commas and annoying little wording booboos. But at its heart, it was about the characters there—the ones I cared deeply about, and even the ones I despised. I didn’t want anything to get in the way of my future reader’s subjective experience of them. For them, both my readers and my characters, I needed my writing to be clear so meaning, and relationship and the way good and harm bump up against each other would shine through.
It has been a very human endeavour, and it has taken lots of time.
Human ultimately comes down to individual subjectivity, both mine and yours, in worlds both fictional and otherwise. Our subjective, internal map of the world dictates how we make it through the outer world of circumstance and our engagement with others— others who, of course, are navigating from within their own internal maps of the world, too. Readers of An Incoming Tide will bring their own subjectivity to their experience of the characters within, their story, and the humanness there.
It is that internal subjectivity that guides us—desperately or disappointedly at times, delightfully at others— guides us to discover meaning, experience companionship, and responsibly recognize and promote what is good.
But we can get impatient, or at least I can.
Everything takes longer than it takes.
After the mentor’s magic of the first adage, this second one came to me as a result of my own experience of elaborating my inner world while engaging with the outer one. I was sensing my own impatience.
Part of one’s internal world are expectations. We don’t always get those right. Life doesn’t go exactly as we predict because other humans are involved—and even our internal maps of what should be oft lead us astray.
I had great work done for me on An Incoming Tide by FriesenPress. You get to experience that good work when you look at the cover of the novel—I still get captivated by the hovering eye over the incoming tide depicted there. As you read this blog on an elegantly designed website, you are reaping the benefits of a Designer and a Promotional Specialist who were willing to take the time to make beautiful the ideas I had.
At the outset, I didn’t understand why it would take the length of time that the consultant and Publication Specialist at FriesenPress said it would. They said, it just would. And in the end, it did. They were right.
Because it took longer than I thought it would take, it has made my subjective world of being an author better. I hope so for you as a consumer, too.
These two adages, Everything human takes time and Everything takes longer than it takes stayed with me for over forty years on the frontlines of helping those with significant mental health difficulties. And now they flop over into my world as an author.
As much as impatience, and frustration, and bewilderment about the human condition of others (and I guess, of myself) has been part of that journey, ultimately it has been a very human endeavour—full of meaning, and companionship, and taking responsibility to bring goodness into this world.
I will never get it completely right, just better as I go along.