It’s November! Finally it is National Novel Writing
Month—NaNoWriMo. This year, I am trying to write a mystery--adult, not middle
grade or young adult. I need 50,000 words by the end of this month, and a
beginning, middle, and end.
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| Tea, jewels, and Christmas--all part of the story. |
I’ve tried to write mysteries before without
success. Somehow my mind doesn’t work in the right way for plotting a clever murder
(and how the murderer will nonetheless fail to get away with it.) I have the
same problem with heists and other criminal plots. I love to read books with
ingeniously carried out crimes, but I draw a blank when I try to think one up
myself. I think other authors must look around them, wherever they are, and notice
potential murder methods. As in “Hey, look at the spike on that beach umbrella.
I wonder if you could kill someone with it, then put the umbrella up so no one
would notice the blood on the spiky bit.” And other such thoughts.
Okay, so apparently I can come up with a murder method, at least a weak one. But it doesn’t
happen easily or spontaneously.
There’s another, more serious, problem. I don’t
really want to write about a murder.
I have no difficulty enjoying mysteries in which
one (or two or three) people are murdered. You’d think it might bother me, but
it doesn’t. Granted, I avoid the really dark, disturbing varieties of murder
mystery, but I don’t read only the humorous or cozy variety, either. One of my
favorite series is the one with Inspector Gamache, by Louise Penny, which is
serious but not overly dark.
So why doesn’t murder bother me when I read a
mystery? I suppose it’s sufficiently unreal, and so entirely expected, that I
don’t take it to heart. And yet, when I set out to write a story in which one
of my characters kills another one, it feels
different. To make sense of the murder, I have to have a character who is so
dark or so desperate that he is willing to kill. And I have to have other
characters who can be suspected of being that dark or desperate. Suddenly it
all feels much too serious—a world I don’t want to live in long enough to write
about.
It could be partly that I have been very lucky in
my family, neighbors, and co-workers throughout my life. I haven’t had a lot of
experience with the kind of people that make you really want to kill them, or
the kind of people that leave you scared for your own safety. Mostly I meet
those people in fiction—and then I do see red and want violent things to happen
to them. Maybe if I had to live with such people, I would be more interested in
putting those people in a story and either killing them off in a painful
manner, or meting out justice to them after having them kill someone. Or maybe
it’s got nothing to do with that. I really don’t know.
So I’m not writing a murder mystery. At least, I
don’t think so. The plan is for a robbery to take place, but lots of things
could change over the course of the month. Somehow I’ve already gotten 10,000
words in (which is a speed record for me, I think) but I haven’t gotten much
farther than introducing my cast of characters. That theft better happen soon
or I won’t have a story.
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| The cat investigates. Not in my novel, however. |
Till next post.
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