Steinbeck, Austin and O'Neill...except for the stuffed mouse

My book Nosy in Nebraska is releasing

DRUMROLL PLEASE—

TODAY

In honor of that

I am giving away one free copy to one commentor so this is no time to lurk.

Nosy in Nebraska is a departure for me.

It’s a cozy mystery romantic comedy. Three shorter books all set in the same small Nebraska town.

Nosy in Nebraska contains:

Of Mice. . .and Murder;

Pride and Pestilence;

The Miceman Cometh.

Very similar to the classic works of John Steinbeck, Jane Austin, and Eugene O’Neill, only with murder, romantic comedy and a giant stuffed mouse.

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But believe it or not, that's not what I'm going to talk about today.

I'm going to talk about dealing with wasted days and wasted night.

Wow, country western song alert.
I’m better now, but time was I wrote for a long time before I got to the beginning of a book.

I’m going to talk today about how to pick your beginning, but also how to not let it drive you nuts when you get told, often by a contest judge, that your book hasn’t started yet on page fifteen.

Cheryl Wyatt calls the beginning an ‘inciting incident’ and I like that. Incite is a word you hear attached to riot. Rodney King's beating incited a riot.

That’s what you want for your beginning. Something big and fast paced and high stakes. But I used to write along telling my story and at some point it would all sort of click and, especially when it came to characters, I’d suddenly find a key to them and the character would come to life and be three dimentional and now this REAL character would severely affect the story.

It wasn’t uncommon for that CLICK to come at around page ONE HUNDRED.

So, I’d go back and rewrite. Often throwing out huge chunks of the story to recreate the character as I now knew he (it was sooooooo often the man, isn't it ALWAYS a man?) really was.

NO, that's not a picture of my family. We didn't have money for fancy HATS.

I am a Nebraska ranch wife and as such I’m pretty conservative in many ways.

No one needs to tell me to shut the light off when I leave a room, or turn the thermostat down and put on a sweater, or buy a car that gets high gas mileage. That’s something I’ve been doing from birth and not because I’m trying to save the planet. It’s because I hate waste.

I was raised by parents who remembered the depression, as was my husband.

Use it up. Wear it out. Make it do. Do without.

Those are WWII words during rationing. I lived those words as a child in a family of eight kids in a two bedroom farm house. No, that's not a picture of our house. We didn't have a showy place like THAT!>>>>>

It's kinda hard to learn to be wasteful...and that applies to work and words.

So wasting all those hours, throwing away all those words, it’s like tossing out the mushy apples in the fridge when it would be so easy to just make apple sauce. It’s like throwing out three stale slices of bread instead of making bread pudding or stuffing for a roast chicken.
It is not natural.

And then I got a hold of a mindset that helped me handle it better.

I’ve read a lot about character charts or ‘interviewing your characters’ or creating background sheets for your characters. And I realized that’s what I was doing with all that writing before the story started. Tossing out all that writing was NOT wasteful. I needed to do it. It was necessary. It was an exercise I needed to do to create my story.

So the next time someone in a contest critique tells you ‘your story doesn’t start until page nineteen” (that happened to me once—and she was right—but it took me a few years to figure that out)

or

This is a backstory dump.

Cut it. Do it.

Don’t get upset, don’t feel like your time was wasted. Just pick a new spot to start, farther on down the road of your story. What you’ve written becomes backstory and chances are it’s all important—it's just not FIRST.

You needed to write it. Now you’ll weave it into your story, bits at a time, in dialogue and sentence tags.

No wasted days and wasted nights. No wasted words.

You're still going to use them up, wear them out, make them do, in a few unfortunate cases, do without.

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Check on my website for what to expect from Nosy in Nebraska.

http://www.maryconnealy.com/

And leave a comment AND YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS---to get your name in the drawing for a signed copy.